As much as I’ve tried to resist the allure of Survivors games for being a relatively generic, basic type of game, I can’t help but find myself enthralled by them. During the Steam Next Fest, we took a look at Jötunnslayer: Hordes of Hel, a Survivors game originally codenamed Viking Survivors, which was much easier to remember, but it still brings some good ol’ Valhalla-worthy battle to the Survivors arena with a more complicated but perhaps more appropriate name.
For the purposes of this demo, you have access to play as the Barbarian, the Seeress (Sorceress), and the Revenant (Hunter). This game is more akin to Death Must Die than say, Vampire Survivors or an arena based Survivor like Brotato. The gimmick in this game is that you can use gold to buy passive skills for each of the Gods that will grant blessings to each character type, or you can choose to invest in each of the characters directly for improved stats while playing them. Several of the Norse Gods appear to offer assistance, each offering a few different active as well as passive skills for you to invest in, giving you plenty of versatility in builds. Loki, being the Trickster God will grant you bonuses but there’s a chance it’ll backfire and buff enemies instead, while Thor lets you summon a statue that randomly spawns and raises his fist, casting lightning to continually strike anything nearby. Freya offers both AOE abilities as well as incredibly useful passives like increased experience gain, but you can also focus more on building your character and invest in their skills and passives instead if given the opportunity.
For me, I used the Barbarian and focused on his passives to increase attack speed and take less damage per hit in order to start accumulating some gold so I could unlock more passive powers such as Loki’s increased gold drop chance, Thor’s extra bonus health, and Freya’s increased bonus experience gain. The more I played, the more gold I started to accumulate and beating the difficulty levels unlock the next tier which increases the difficulty but also the rewards. Pretty par for the course stuff here, but the gems being turned into little candies for Halloween was a nice touch, and gives me optimism that the game will receive updates regularly.
The Seeress uses a blast of dark magic to attack enemies one by one, but the impact from the blast has a small AOE that helps limit her single target ability. Her gimmick is that she has a passive shield which triggers and makes her take less damage while it’s active, and her active ability lets her send out a blast wave that curses enemies so they take more damage for a few seconds while marked. Barbarian passively increases attack speed with lower health and has an active ability that sends out a ring of axes that cripple enemies which makes them slower to get to you. Finally, the Revenant has a passive wolf that can seek out enemies and do damage, and his active ability freezes enemies in place if hit by one of the arrows that launch out in the cardinal directions. Revenant feels like the weakest tuned character right now, but this demo is the first time he’s been playable, and there’s a chance this is addressed by an update to the demo before the game actually releases.
One of the unique things about this title is that at a certain point, you’ll get to specialize your “class” by choosing one of three specific ways you want to play the character for the remainder of the run. For example: The Seeress can opt to cause damage to enemies hit by absorbing experience crystals that pass through them, while the Revenant can maximize damage with his ghost wolf, and the Barbarian can continue to go berserk and increase his healing allowing him to regenerate faster while enveloped within the horde.
I’ve put about four hours across the preview build and this demo and it’s pretty promising thus far, but it runs like hot garbage unless you turn off V-Sync and a few other options because it’s still a fairly early demo. Still, I plan on keeping an eye on this one and look forward to delivering more impressions later, eventually leading to an actual review once it hits 1.0.
Jötunnslayer: Hordes of Hel has a demo available on Microsoft Windows (through Steam) with a planned Early Access release date of Q4 2024.
