A Mixed Return to Real-Time Strategy Roots - The Valiant Quick Review
For years now, real-time strategy games have been a niche within a niche, with rare new releases worth getting excited about and hardcore fans more than happy to stick with old classics rather than migrate to something fresh. Given their current status, it’s easy to forget that RTS titles were once huge hits that were about as mainstream as PC games could be at the time. I was personally obsessed with strategy games in my high school years, back before Warcraft was mostly known as an MMO; back when Age of Empires had more multiplayer servers running than any other game; and back when Command & Conquer was a franchise that EA had any clue what to do with.
The Valiant, a new real-time strategy release from Hungarian developer Kite Games, feels very much like an attempt to reclaim the glory of that point in time. The results, however, leave a bit to be desired.
THE STORY
The Valiant follows the exploits of two European knights—Theoderich and Ulrich—who find themselves on opposing sides of an intense conflict. While conquering the Holy Land during the Crusades, Ulrich stumbles across a mysterious relic known as the Rod of Aaron. This artifact grants him power but also slowly corrupts him, sending him into a bloodlust that earns him great status but pushes away former friends. Eventually Theoderich is lured out of retirement from knighthood in order to track down other relics that Ulrich is after, to prevent his former comrade from becoming an unstoppable menace.
PLATFORMS
The Valiant is currently only available on PC, though it is planned for launch on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S and X at some point in the future. I’m curious how the game will feel with a controller—notoriously not the ideal way to play a real-time strategy game—but I didn’t experience any notable technical issues while playing on PC via Steam.
TIME PLAYED
I have spent five hours with The Valiant so far. Most of that time was spent in campaign mode, where I made it through the prologue and the first few missions beyond that, approximately a third of the way through the game’s fifteen single-player levels. I also played a couple of matches in the competitive multiplayer mode and spent some time trying to find partners for the game’s cooperative Last Man Standing mode. More on those experiences below.
WHAT’S AWESOME
• Old-school RTS feel. As I mentioned in my intro, The Valiant has a very direct and apparent goal of attempting to capture some of the magic of classic strategy titles like Warcraft III and Age of Empires II. I won’t say that it’s one hundred percent successful, but there are moments in the campaign where things clicked into place, and I definitely had the same buzz I got from playing through Blizzard’s best single-player real-time strategy missions. In particular, The Valiant wonderfully emulates the rhythm of a StarCraft or Warcraft III mission, with slowly evolving objectives revealed through brief in-mission cutscenes.
• Light RPG elements. Your mileage may vary on whether you consider this a plus—RTS purists might hate it—but I enjoyed how The Valiant supplements its campaign with character progression. Playable heroes level up and have multiple skill trees they can put points into. Those skill trees also affect units of a similar type to the hero in question, which I thought was clever; for example, unlocking a talent that reduces the cost of skills for the archer hero Konrad will provide the same upgrade to all archer and crossbowmen squads for the rest of the campaign. There’s also a gear system, albeit a simple one. It all adds up to provide a little more depth and sense of control over how characters develop.
WHAT SUCKS
• Already-dwindling player base. I love real-time strategy campaigns, but if we’re being honest, the biggest draw for this genre is multiplayer match-ups. The Valiant has a huge system of cosmetic unlocks and daily quests to encourage players to stay invested, but it doesn’t seem like the game has managed to build up the base necessary to support multiplayer, much less to keep it going long-term.
For one match of multiplayer, I waited in the queue for nearly ten minutes before finally getting matched up with a player who was seven ranks higher than me. Needless to say, I got demolished. When I tried to test out the co-op mode, I was in queue even longer and never managed to pull together the two other players needed to start a match. Granted, I may not have been playing at peak times, but a glance at Steam Charts shows The Valiant with a dire all-time peak of less than two hundred players online at the same time. I’m skeptical that a multiplayer community will blossom from here without major changes or a minor miracle—or both.
• Wave after wave after wave. While The Valiant’s single-player missions change up objectives and let you do some exploration, there’s one tried-and-true challenge they return to over and over again: surviving against waves of enemies. Every mission I played had at least two points where I had to stand my ground as waves of enemies crashed against my squads. And that Last Man Standing co-op mode I mentioned? Though I didn’t actually get into any games to try it myself, it is apparently a wave-based survival mode. I’m fine with taking on waves of enemies, but surely there’s more interesting ways to build on the RTS formula than this.
SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?
This is a tough one, because, as I mentioned, it’s not like the real-time strategy genre is overflowing with options these days. If you’re a fan of some of the classic games I’ve mentioned throughout this article, and if you can enjoy (or even prefer) your RTS in single-player form, The Valiant is probably worth giving a shot. If you’re looking for something that really matches up to the glory of the past, though, or if you generally stick to multiplayer in your strategy games, this one will probably disappoint you.
💬 Do you prefer single-player or multiplayer when you’re playing real-time strategy games? And what’s your favorite in the genre? Let me know in the comments!
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