Valfaris: Mecha Therion Review (Switch eShop)

Valfaris: Mecha Therion wastes no time in getting going. During the briefest of cutscenes we’re re-introduced to series main man Therion on a gothic-styled spaceship hurtling through the stars. Hekate, his AI companion, says she’s picked up the signal of his father, Vroll, the man responsible for the destruction of Therion’s home planet Valfaris, and someone Therion would very much like to kill. Therion turns and, with a strut, heads off to battle. We found it all delightfully brief.

While the previous game (the idiosyncratic Valfaris) was a hectic Contra-style run-and-gun experience, this sequel has morphed the series into a side-scrolling shooter – R-Type by way of Pacific Rim. The setting is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi hellscape where colour palettes have been maxed out to their highest saturation and contrast, and a pleasingly epic death metal soundtrack accompanies every moment.

In the final beat of that opening cutscene, Therion beams himself into a mech. 20 or so seconds after pressing start for the first time we blasted forth out of the safety of our ship and into either a skippable tutorial or the deep space of the game proper. We only had a very vague memory of the first game, and the lack of any more grounding in the world or the story left us feeling immediately confused. It was like being transported into a heavy metal festival when we’d just spent a week on a beach listening to the calm sounds of the sea.

We enjoyed this shock to our systems. There’s not much about Valfaris: Mecha Therion’s style that we would have personally chosen, but we soon felt that the garish presentation was something we could learn to love – a fever dream version of the types of 1980s cartoons that only much older kids than us at the time got to see.

The soundtrack is wall-to-wall metal, and the mood evoked by former Celtic Frost guitarist Curt Victor Bryant’s riffs set an epic tone. In fact, so many of the game’s ingredients made us think of it as a shooter version of Quake: iconic soundtrack – check; a sense that we were launching an attack on hell – check; relentless action broken up into smaller chunks that required repeating and repeating until we mastered them – check.

Therion’s mech suit has three slots for weapons and two slots for additional upgrades. Broadly speaking, the weapons amount to a sword, a gun, and a third alternating option, which can be changed at checkpoints. Sometimes we equipped a slow-motion missile that we could manually aim, sometimes an electric shock that bloomed around the mech suit and took out enemies. We unlocked plenty of guns throughout – blasters, shotguns, sprawling lasers – they were genuinely different and fun to use.

Most important of all were the swords (or sometimes axes) that served as vital tools both in attack and – more significantly in relation to the gameplay – defence. Much like original Valfaris, slashing at damaging orbs and rockets has two purposes: stopping these attacks from hitting the mech and also recharging our main gun. This is Mecha Therion’s gameplay USP. Blasting with abandon needs to be balanced with replenishing your energy, otherwise your gun sputters and spits and weakens. If that happens then you’re in trouble. Making sure we weren’t caught out in this way when larger enemies showed up, or when we were in particularly challenging sections of a level, was critical. This balancing act is easy to understand and just as easy to forget.

The original platforming Valfaris, was hugely over the top. Grossness and gore were taken to extreme levels. Enemies were unyielding and constant. Mecha Therion is also full of excess, but we feel that developer Steel Mantis has reigned in its wilder impulses for this sequel. And we mean this as a compliment. The game struts forth with a sense of restraint in all the right places, even if there’s still plenty of eccentricity on show. The result is that Mecha Therion’s more outlandish settings and characters have a little more chance to breathe.

The bullet-and-ship-dodging action is brought to life in a pixel-heavy 2.5D style. Lovely details permeate through the stages: enormous statues, ruins, moonscapes. We gained a sense of our mecha’s size by comparing it to the miniature space marines shooting at us from planet surfaces. One location featured giant creatures strutting around in the background firing lasers forwards – and almost through the Switch’s screen itself. It was an effect like in a cheesy 3D movie, and we loved it.

We dodged through the bullet hell caused by hulking spaceships and floating eye orbs, carefully timing defensive swipes with our sword while taking any opportunity we could get to unleash our own attacks. As we played, we died a lot, but we rarely got frustrated. The checkpoint system was generous enough without making the game too easy.

Still, plenty of sections of the game required five or six attempts. We felt tested. We clenched our teeth when the game shifted perspective slightly and whisked us off at double speed. Throughout its runtime Valfaris: Mecha Tyrion feels challenging but never unfair. It looks great and performs well on the Switch in both handheld and docked modes, and if you have the itch for a tightly-designed and fun four-hour shooter, it’s definitely worth a go.