
	Platform Wii Genre Role-Playing Publisher Xseed Games Developer Marvelous Inc. / K2 LLC /Kurogame ESRB T (Teen) Released September 29, 2009

- Makes a good coaster - The case is white, so it will blend in unobtrusively with your other Wii games.

- Everything. And if this game had kitchen sinks, they'd also be terrible

Review: Rabbids, Go Home (Wii) Review: Bakugan Battle Brawlers (Wii) Review: Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
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Valhalla Knights: The Eldar Saga

Score: 1.5 / 10

This game is terrible. Don't buy it. Don't read about it, don't talk about it. Don't even look at it. If you see it in a store, hide it under the shelves so no one else can buy it.

Okay, so you've stumbled into the second paragraph of my review, so I guess I have to continue to write about it. But you've been told, so once you're done and

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want someone to blame for losing two minutes of your life, you know right where to point the finger. Because I told you so.

Valhalla Knights: The Eldar Saga is the story of whatever ugly character you kind of, but not really, custom create. The world is in trouble, and you have to collect things to make it right. Were I to go into any more detail would give credence to the effort the developer put into the game.

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Do you want to know about graphics? Because it hasn't got any! Not proper ones. The visuals that have stumbled into this game have suffered a long and painful road, and they are but shadows of their former selves. They come in two colours: shitty mud and muddy shit. Which is fine, because the world in which the game is set is barren, dead wasteland with the occasional enemy to kill. Not that there is anything wrong with barren, dead wastelands. Video games are filled with them. Here, though, that's exactly what they weren't going for, and just looking at the game, you feel embarrassed for the developer. Shawn Elliott, while he did not coin the term, but was instrumental in its use. That term is Wahjah and it means embarrassment by proxy. It is very applicable here.

Am I now compelled to tell you of gameplay? Do you want all the fun of killing arbitrary shit? This game has it spades with the added benefit of not doing it with anyone like in an MMO. And without the benefit of even a pathetically tacked-on context?

It wouldn't be so bad if there was a bit of action. This is an Action RPG after all. But the mechanism by which you propel action (killing and chopping and what have you) is an exercise in frustration. Often I found myself chopping the air, helplessly stuck in a combo, while my target was a good few feet behind me. To pay for the privilege to become the least effective generic fantasy hero of all time is truly an insult.

Speaking of insults, the worst, and I mean absolute worst, are the RPG mechanics. If you were given a beautiful and detailed world with an excellent story and well thought out character development, I could understand negotiating a dozen stat categories that may or may not effect your performance in a game. Here, it is a chore. It is more than a chore. It is just another excuse to avoid this game.

Games like Valhalla Knights: The Eldar Saga ruin all video games for me. Dozens of people wasted their time making it. Thousands of dollars were wasted to make sure that you could see it in a store and not buy it. It wasted hours of my life. And now it has forced me to waste 600 words on the internet to describe what I said in my first two sentences. Which I will reiterate now: This game is terrible. Don't buy it.

- Andrew Hiscock

(February 9, 2010)