Auto battlers are one of the hot new genres that seem to have sprung up recently, yet I have only ever lightly dabbled in them. Around the time Teamfight Tactics came out, I was still gripped by a debilitating League addiction, so I ended up giving this new style of strategy game a try. Taking control out of the battles seemed like an odd choice at the time, surely that’s where the fun and skill is right?
What this actually ends up doing is removing the element of mechanical skill and allowing players to compete solely on the strategic aspect.. and nowadays, my mechanical skill is certainly rather rusty! When I saw Valefor pop up in the upcoming list it seemed like a great opportunity to jump back in.
Released on the 8th of November on Steam, Valefor is a dark fantasy skin on the auto-battling genre and follows on from the game’s successful mobile release. The Steam version offers the full game without ads and includes the DLC upgrade that mobile users have to grind for. To add to the offering, Valefor also boasts roguelite dungeons and a kingdom-building aspect alongside its PVP arena. So let’s discuss if it’s worth your time.
The Introduction
So, for those who may be unaware, let’s go over how autobattlers work. Most games in the genre share some similar traits. Before each round, you will draft characters, each with their own abilities and items from the available pool, as well as choose what combination to bring into battle and where to position them before letting them fight the enemy automatically.
Items can frequently be combined into more powerful versions, and collecting a certain amount (usually 3) of a character will merge them to create a stronger version. You then take your warband into a sequence of battles and try to win a set amount without losing all your lives. It’s a style of game that at first feels very simple but actually has a huge amount of tactical depth. You might choose to run with a weaker team early on that will scale better with items or try to rush some wins out early before trying to pivot and eke out the final few victories.
Valefor sticks to this baseline however expands upon it. Normal items can be combined to make more powerful equipment with unique effects, and both the equipment and the kingdom you are building adhere to this “match 3” system. Want a shield? You can get it by combining 3 of its lesser parts; the same is true of your kingdom.
The kingdom-building aspect is rather light, but you will be able to spend gold gained through your victories on upgrading your band of warriors in the single-player campaign or developing your kingdom. Combine 3 Orc Forts, and you will gain an Orc Tower, which grants a permanent buff to your Orc units. Combine 3 of those for an even bigger buff… it leads to a system of rather satisfying incremental gains where you are always a few wins away from a new building or a new character. Just be aware that while you have a growing kingdom, this is a supplementary feature and is not going to satisfy the craving of someone looking for a true kingdom builder.
The Graphics & Sound
I would be remiss not to mention both Valefor’s art and sound design, both the good and the bad. Let’s start with the former, the character designs are great. 4 factions, 6 units each, and all visually distinct with a great sense of style. Of course, it’s filled with a lot of fantasy tropes, rippling muscles and revealing armor abound, but it fits the theme of the game. Your time outside battle will be accompanied by some gentle string background music to add to the rather medieval feel. At a glance, it looks and sounds good, and the additional short songs you find over the course of the single-player dungeons add a nice bit of flair and lore to the world, even if they might not make my Spotify playlist!
Sadly, there are some presentation issues that will turn some people away. The most notable of which is going to be the lack of combat animations. Units are represented by 2D sprites that slide along the board and tilt slightly to attack. Initially, it’s rather jarring, but I settled into it more with time. Still, if you want to sit back and watch some stylized battles play out, pick Mechabellum instead.
This is further impacted by the title, which still bears evidence of its mobile origins. The graphics options are almost non-existent and when blown up on a large screen, some of the sprites do show some slightly rougher edges. We have certainly seen worse mobile ports but there is real room for improvement.
The maps are also a slight point of contention for me. They look good, and the winding pathways add a sense of progression as you gain more ground after each fight. Yet the fact they are relatively narrow leads to your huge assortment of characters and items feeling scattered all over the place and also makes it rather difficult to tell at a glance what resources you actually have to hand. It is even more confusing until you learn which items combine to make which units and which ones you want to sell.
The ‘Single’ Player
I title it as such because, in reality, the multiplayer of this game is asynchronous, so at no point are you ever facing a human on the other end of the screen, just a team they also built in a PVP run. Still, the game advertises roguelite dungeons and a PVP arena, so let’s cover both off and start with the roguelite dungeons.
Gold that you gain from both single-player and multiplayer battles goes towards beefing up your team to progress through each level. There are 15 tiers of dungeon to work through, and you will have a number of lives in each to allow some leniency rather than requiring back-to-back wins. After each battle (win or lose), you will find a treasure chest with broken pieces of equipment. These will build up to full items you can either give to your units or sell in the hopes of finding something that suits your team’s strategy better.
While I do think a single-player addition is a nice addition, it does have a weird scaling problem. You can find that your team/kingdom is not upgraded enough, which means that you have to repeatedly ram your head into the impossible wall to get money and have a shot. In many roguelites, you can, in theory, clear the game in one run if you are good enough, but in Valefor, that is basically an impossibility as your team will just not advance quick enough to have a shot at later-level dungeons no matter how perfect your placement or item choices are. Since launch, this has been adjusted to be a bit smoother, but it is still a problem you may run into.
The opposite is also true; if you have been grinding plenty of PVP and have an upgraded team, then you can breeze through a dungeon with minimal strategy. There is a sweet spot where you do feel like victory is achievable with the right items but it’s hard to consistently be in it. It’s a good way to ease people into the game without the intimidating idea of facing other players’ teams or worrying about rank, but I can’t recommend this game if this is the only mode you are going to play. It serves as a nice meta-game between PVP rounds rather than a standalone expansion.
The PVP Arena
Arguably, it’s the meat of the game. As mentioned before, Valefor is similar to something like Super Auto Pets in that it solely uses asynchronous multiplayer. This makes it great for a more casual experience because you can take your time arranging and equipping your team and have the ability to stop after any battle and return to it later.
Don’t be deceived by that casual feeling; there is a whole lot of depth here to learn if you decide to put the time in. Unlike the singleplayer’s ever-growing army, each multiplayer run is going to start you with two items and enough funds to buy 2 characters. How you build your team from there is up to you and what you find. 24 characters and 20 different items might not sound like a huge amount initially, but it leads to thousands of varied combinations on top of the team-wide bonuses you can pick as you go.
Each battle sees you placed against another opposing team at the same step within the same rank. Win 8 battles to go up a division, while a loss will send you back down. The game’s real skill is balancing all your resources and adapting to what you run into. One of the most common resources will be coins, eventually accumulating in a gold ring. These gold rings can be used to enhance items to more powerful versions, sold for money to spend on team members, or two of them can be combined to increase your team size.
This gives the player a lot of freedom over what direction to expand their team. A team of many weaker units will benefit from class and race synergies but might struggle to beat a smaller team outfitted with strong equipment that compliments each unit’s stats and ability. It’s a very difficult balancing act, but one that benefits the title greatly by allowing the player to be presented with interesting strategic choices constantly.
It’s a big leap to make, but I would almost compare it to chess in the sense that outwardly it might look simple and not overtly flashy, but you could sink a lot of time into Valefor trying to perfect your adaptations to different scenarios and working out different builds/item combos. If you can get past the lacking animations and sparse tutorials, there is some great, addictive gameplay buried beneath.
Final Thoughts
I actually had to rewrite multiple parts of this review because the developer has already pushed out a number of changes within the first few days of launch that addressed some of the criticisms I initially had. Originally, you only got gold from PVP if you won the entire run, which could lead to a loss, feeling doubly crushing as you went down a rank and got no reward. Now, you get gold for each victory within a run, even if you lose overall. Hopefully, this trend will continue, as I feel with a few more patches and some quality of life changes. Valefor becomes a much easier recommendation.
As it currently stands I think Valefor is a solid choice if you want a strategic autobattler, especially for the relatively low price point. I enjoyed my time building up my collection and trying new builds and I have still been booting it up every now and then for a light strategy hit. The big caveat to this is that you need to know what to expect going into the game.
It does not work too well as a standalone kingdom builder or roguelite dungeon crawler and is unlikely to convert existing fans of these genres. If this is your very first foray into the auto battler genre then be prepared to push through and do some reading outside of the game to get a feel for how this actually should play. Having said all that, I can certainly see it being a title I throw up on a second monitor and chill with for a little while to come.
The developer provided the review key for Valefor.
