Valor of Man

It is simply the best game I've never played

8/10 Perfect for Tactical Turn-Based Fans I love the turn based Action Point system here. As someone who’s a big fan of Pathfinder 2.0’s 3 action economy, I’ve always been disappointed that Owlcat never leaned into that style again. Valor of Man really fills that void, at least from a tactical combat perspective. You’ve got a party of 4 characters, each with around 3 subclasses, and they all feel distinct with clear roles. The combat is where the game shines. It’s flexible, thoughtful, and rewards planning without feeling overly punishing. The story has a really cool hook too. Humanity is stuck in a never ending loop, and your character slowly starts remembering past cycles. Each time you beat the third boss, things reset but not quite the same. Dialogues start familiar but end differently, and characters can shift into entirely different versions of themselves. It’s a great idea. That said, the execution doesn’t fully land. The writing can feel a bit too brief, and it seems like translation issues get in the way at times. As the loops go on, the changes become harder to follow instead of more intriguing. It also doesn’t help that the game reuses the same handful of background art pieces, which makes everything blur together after a while. Still, if you’re here for tactical combat and that Pathfinder style action economy, this absolutely delivers. It’s not perfect, but it scratches a very specific itch that not many games even try to reach.

Just love the tactical combat. Gets quite challenging, but builds. The replay-ability is great and keeps you cycling through with more interesting and powerful upgrades. Its nicely balanced and always provides a good level of challenge. Would love to see this system in a more open world setting and the ability to build out characters with more intent.

This game may, actually, will, inflict psychic damage on you Reviewed for startmenu.co.uk : https://www.startmenu.co.uk/home/review-valor-of-man

The "StS but encounters are tactical battles" is implemented perfectly competently here, but what really makes Valor of Man stand out are the unique mechanics that those tactical battles revolve around. In addition to the actions that they take on their turns, enemies have reactions that are triggered every time that they're the primary target of a player character's attack. This system is quite intricate and takes some getting used to (toggle the bestiary tab on and *read* enemy's abilities when you first encounter them), but it's a very compelling riff on the standard some-flavor-of-initiative-based turn ordering systems. The second major twist is that player characters can be eliminated from combat either when their HP reaches 0 *or* when their secondary resource ("courage") reaches 0. This resource can be reduced by enemies, but is more frequently reduced as a cost associated with the use of more powerful player abilities. This cost often only triggers some percentage of the time that a given ability is used, which speaks to my only substantive complaint about game mechanics to this point - much of the variance revolves around dodging low rolls on non-deterministic courage loss and/or enemy reaction triggers, and it seems like there might be a more elegant solution here than x% chance of outcome y (Larger courage pools with deterministic costs? Removing fail chance from enemy reactions and toning them down accordingly?). Overall Valor of Man is worth trying to see if the combat system clicks with you, and if the game attracts enough attention to continue development I would not be at all surprised to see some of the novel mechanics here show up in other tactical combat contexts.

absolutely worth the money.

体感不错，升级随机性和构筑比较平衡，不想被虐的可以降低难度。小小的遗憾，最后故事线性结束就没有后续玩的欲望了