Valor Mortis Launches Into a Crowded October, and Reviewers Mostly Approve

Valor Mortis launched on October 13, 2026 for PC via Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S at $39.99, and it arrived on Xbox Game Pass the same day. Reviews went live on October 12, hours before the game did. Insider Gaming called it "a generational step forward for Souls games." Eurogamer called it "a delight." IGN gave it 7 out of 10 and said it is "packed with interesting ideas, even if they don't always work out super smoothly."

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Put those three next to each other and you have the month's most arguable release. The praise for the combat is not in dispute. The disagreement is about whether the parts around it hold together.

Valor Mortis comes from One More Level, the Polish studio behind Ghostrunner and Ghostrunner 2, and is published by Lyrical Games and the studio itself. The standard version is $39.99. The game was once dated for September 24 and moved to October 13; Softonic reported the shift was made to avoid a crowded release window. It was revealed at Gamescom Opening Night Live in August 2025, and it is a hard turn away from the cyberpunk parkour the studio is known for.

A first-person view raises the stakes

Almost every game in the soulslike tradition puts the camera behind the character. That distance does real work. It lets you read a boss's wind-up, judge spacing, and keep a crowd in the frame. Move the camera inside the character's head and the margin shrinks. Peripheral vision goes away. Lock-on starts to matter more. A second enemy behind you becomes a sound you cannot see.

One More Level knows the trade from a different genre. Ghostrunner (2020) and Ghostrunner 2 (2023) are first-person parkour games where a single hit kills you and standing still is fatal. Valor Mortis keeps the movement and slows the tempo. Enemies respawn, currency drops where you die and can be retrieved on the way back, and lantern-like checkpoints open shortcuts through connected areas. The soulslike systems are all in place, down to the shortcuts between areas.

The trade cuts both ways. A first-person camera makes each hit land harder and each ambush more disorienting, and it also makes crowd control harder to read than in a third-person game where the camera pulls out to show you what is behind you. The answer here is movement. Instead of backstepping out of trouble, you climb, swing and drop onto enemies from above. The studio's parkour experience is doing real work, and it is the clearest reason the game feels unlike anything else in the genre right now.

An undead Napoleonic Europe

The setting is an alternate 19th century in which Napoleon's campaigns have left behind something worse than an empire. A plague raises dead soldiers as horrors, and the player, a soldier named William, wakes from death with a left arm that can transform into weapons, including a flamethrower. Napoleon's army is both the backdrop and the enemy, and the game leans on the fact that its soldiers keep returning to life as much as the player's character does.

Using a real historical war as the frame for a supernatural plague is unusual for the genre, which usually invents its kingdoms and cathedrals. It also gives Valor Mortis a visual identity that separates it from its competition: torchlight, mud, trenches and blistered flesh instead of gothic architecture. Art direction is the one thing nearly every critic agrees on.

The world is semi-open, built from connected biomes that include a night-time village, a submerged town, infested sewers and caverns. The structure will be familiar to anyone who has played a soulslike, and so will the systems layered over it.

Parries, weak points and parkour

Combat mixes sword and gun. You can free-aim a pistol without slowing your momentum, and hitting a glowing weak point breaks an enemy's guard and opens it to a critical blow. Perfect parries do the same job in melee. The toolkit is deliberately narrow, closer to Sekiro than to Dark Souls, with a small set of weapons and transformable powers the game calls Transmutations.

That narrowness is a design choice, and it is one of the things reviewers fight about. A small toolkit keeps a first-person game legible, since swapping between a long weapon list in a tight field of view gets clumsy fast. It also limits how differently two runs can play. GameSpot's complaint centers on exactly this tension, which is why the score spread is wider than the usual round of launch-week quibbling.

The reviews agree on the core

Insider Gaming's Andrew Highton scored Valor Mortis 9 out of 10 and called it the generational step forward the genre had been waiting for. Eurogamer praised the fluid sword-and-gun combat and the momentum that shapes the level design, and said the result is a delight. Eurogamer's headline made the caveat plain: this is a stellar soulslike, but not one you will recognize. Game Informer's Wesley LeBlanc wrote that Valor Mortis is "a brave new game," while pointing to balance issues in the first half that he found unfair.

The reviewers agree on the first-person combat and the atmosphere. They split on whether the game built around them holds together.

The dissent is specific, not vague. IGN's Travis Northup scored it 7 out of 10, praising the sword-and-fire combat but reporting "loads of bugs and technical issues that need patching fast" and a story he described as "more vibes than substance." GameSpot's Alessandro Barbosa was blunter. His review is headlined "Valor Mortis Is a First-Person Soulslike That Tries Too Much," and he wrote that the game "betrays the heights it reaches in its second half," blaming a limited enemy pool, underused weapons and abilities, and a lack of consistent challenge. GamingTrend went the other way and said the game set a high bar for what Soulslikes should be.

Aggregates settled in the high 70s. Pure Xbox noted a 77 rating as reviews collected and described the reception as mixed, a summary that captures the gap between the nines and the sevens better than any single score. Insider Gaming also noted a roughly 20-hour campaign and weaker boss variety than the best the genre offers, which is a quieter version of the same criticism.

So the disagreement is less about quality than about scope. Critics who value the feel of the combat and the pull of the world rate it highly. Critics who want the systems around that combat to carry a long game rate it lower. Both readings are supported by the same game, and which one you land on may say as much about what you want from the genre as about Valor Mortis itself.

A crowded October shaped by GTA 6

The calendar gives this launch its context. Grand Theft Auto 6 is dated November 19, 2026, and the industry spent the year arranging itself around that date. Few studios want to ship in the weeks around a game expected to dominate attention for months, so October filled up instead. Valor Mortis is one of the titles that moved into that gap, trading September 24 for October 13. It is too early to know whether the move made a difference.

For a $39.99 single-player game with no multiplayer mode, the window is close to the whole equation. Game Pass on day one supplies a large launch audience and removes some of the pressure to turn curiosity into a purchase in the first week. The Steam bundle discount works the other way, giving owners of adjacent games a reason to buy rather than rent. One More Level gets to test both routes at once, which is unusual for a studio stepping outside its established series.

The size of the bet matters for One More Level. Ghostrunner and its sequel were well-reviewed but niche, cult-adjacent games. A new first-person soulslike at $40, backed by a subscription platform, is an attempt to reach past that audience without the full price of a blockbuster. Reviews close to a 77 aggregate are decent for that ambition, and they are also short of the unanimous reception a studio might want when it is asking players to take a chance on something unfamiliar.

Caveats

Three caveats sit next to the scores.

The first is timing. Every figure here comes from the October 12 review window. Aggregates move as late outlets publish, and a rating that reads 77 today can settle a point or two either way. The direction is clearer than the number.

The second is performance. IGN and others flagged bugs and technical problems at launch. That is not unusual for a studio working in a new genre with a new set of systems, but it is the kind of problem that either gets patched within weeks or colors the game's reputation for good.

The third is sales. Strong reviews do not guarantee commercial success, and no unit figures have been published. A day-one Game Pass release complicates the picture further, since players who try the game on a subscription are not counted as buyers, and their retention tells the publisher something different from a sale.

What to watch

• Post-launch patches. The complaints are specific and fixable: bugs, balance, enemy variety. A fast patch would change the conversation.
• Whether the first-person formula spreads. If other studios follow, Valor Mortis will read as the game that opened the door instead of a one-off.
• Build depth and boss variety. These are the most common criticisms, and both can be addressed in post-launch content.
• The Game Pass effect. Subscription placement and a $39.99 price make the commercial test different from a standard release.
• Sales signal. Without figures yet, the months after launch are the only evidence that matters.

The combat and the atmosphere are the parts reviewers agree on. Whether the rest catches up is the open question, and the first patch will be the first answer.

Cover image: an official in-game screenshot from the Valor Mortis Steam store page, One More Level / Lyrical Games, company-distributed for coverage.