"Die for Valhalla!" is a Nintendo Switch game that's been dumped on Steam so PC gamers can pretend their gaming rig is a handheld gaming appliance instead a PC. It's a basic arcade brawler, a little like a lazy ripoff of Golden Axe from the 1980's, only with worse graphics. Yeah, console gamers continue to make gaming worse for everyone.

There's a couple of quirks in this viking themed Golden Axe ripoff, like you resurrect warriors and then control them to do the fighting, but little "innovations" like that aren't enough to resurrect an old, dead gaming genre. The industry moves on. They even have 3D graphics now, but the developers of "Die for Valhalla!" apparently never got the memo. I guess they were too busy working out if they could put this game on iPhones or something.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The game is comprised of very mediocre, amateurish hand drawn 2D illustrations instead of professional looking 3D game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent. Regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is very low, beneath what PC gamers have come to expect in this era of cutting edge photorealistic 3D graphics.

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.

Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

"Die for Valhalla!" has the almost scam-like price of $12 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $12 asking price for this game could get you games like "Stellaris", "Subnautica" or "Metro Exodus". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.