{"id":15545,"date":"2016-10-19T00:01:07","date_gmt":"2016-10-19T00:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=15545"},"modified":"2016-09-25T01:27:25","modified_gmt":"2016-09-25T01:27:25","slug":"jotun-valhalla-edition-wii-u-ps4-xbox-one-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/19\/jotun-valhalla-edition-wii-u-ps4-xbox-one-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"Jotun: Valhalla Edition (Wii U, PS4, Xbox One, PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JOTUN_BOX\"<\/a>Thora is a big, burly, tough as nails female Viking warrior.\u00a0 Unfortunately for her, her boat sank and instead of going to Valhalla, she ends up in Norse purgatory and must fight her way through collecting runes and battling huge bosses to impress the gods.\u00a0 Jotun: Valhalla Edition is a downloadable top-down viewed action game featuring hand-drawn graphics and animation.\u00a0 It\u2019s available for nearly all current game consoles and PC, but reviewed on Wii U here.<\/span><\/p>\n

You play as Thora and move her around in top-down fashion, similar to a classic Zelda title.\u00a0 You can dash, perform light and heavy swings of your axe, and use magic spells.\u00a0 Usually you\u2019ll explore a small area, finding new magic spells, pools to replenish your spirit, golden apples to extend your life, and maybe even a rune or two.\u00a0 Once you have enough, you\u2019ll unlock a door to a huge boss, which you must defeat.\u00a0 You can tell the focal point of this game is the boss battles, as the hand-drawn characters and animations really shine here.\u00a0 The Norse mythology settings are also pretty cool.\u00a0 This Valhalla Edition also has a special mode for expert players, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the game has a few problems.\u00a0 Thora moves very slow, especially in relation to her enemies.\u00a0 Her quick, light axe swing is more like other game characters\u2019 heavy, slow attacks.\u00a0 And I hope you have a few seconds to spare for HER slow heavy attack!\u00a0 Even her dash move is sluggish and hard to avoid enemies\u2019 attacks with.\u00a0 It\u2019s like she ate too much Viking Chow before the adventure.\u00a0 The other problem I had with this game was the lack of any good, well-written instructions.\u00a0 The game doesn\u2019t tell you much as you play, which I\u2019m fine with.\u00a0 But aside from telling you the controls on the options screen, the in-game manual has nothing helpful in it.\u00a0 So I have really no idea what the spirit meter does or what some of the magic spells are for, as an example.\u00a0 This is one of the beefs I have with everything going digital-only, as I\u2019ve found many developers don\u2019t even bother with instructions for their titles anymore.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t necessary a bad game, I just wish it played faster and had better instructions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\"JOTUN_SCREEN\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jotun, Valhalla Edition is rated T for Teen with an ESRB descriptor of Violence.\u00a0 You can swing your axe at enemies, and when they are defeated they just fall down and don\u2019t get up.\u00a0 Bosses may have some detailed death writhes and animations, but there is no blood.\u00a0 I\u2019d be OK with older preteen kids playing this.\u00a0 Reading skill is helpful for some of the text, and younger gamers may have trouble because of the high level of difficulty.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thora is a big, burly, tough as nails female Viking warrior.\u00a0 Unfortunately for her, her boat sank and instead of going to Valhalla, she ends up in Norse purgatory and must fight her way through collecting runes and battling huge bosses to impress the gods.\u00a0 Jotun: Valhalla Edition is a downloadable top-down viewed action game […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15543,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15545"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15547,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15545\/revisions\/15547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}