The Valiant Review
One part small-scale, isometric sword-and-shield skirmishing and one part continent-spanning treasure hunt for a powerful religious artefact, The Valiant is a medieval squad-based RTS that’s as much clicking as it is conquering. If you microwaved your copies Kingdom of Heaven and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and made a scented candle out of the molten goop you might get a whiff of what developer Kite Games is going for here. However, while the result is a competent strategy game overall, it’s also a bit repetitive and shallow – and subsequently not quite as fun as that previous fusion sounds.
An adequate way to quickly describe The Valiant might be as a 13th century Company of Heroes. A more accurate parallel, however, might be 2018’s Ancestor’s Legacy thanks to its broadly comparable Middle Ages setting and its very similar range of unit types. They differ considerably in terms of story, though; while Ancestor’s Legacy is more overtly inspired by historical events (albeit loosely), The Valiant is a the tale of a retired crusader knight, Theoderich von Akenburg, and his search for an ancient and dangerously powerful relic – which he’s racing against an equally dangerous Templar of doom to recover. Joining Theoderich along the way is a brave band of medieval expendables, plucked from several corners of the post-classical world.
The Valiant is the kind of RTS that takes a more intimate approach to tactical, top-down combat by focussing on individually managing a handful of units rather than an enormous army. This approach brings with it a fair degree of initial accessibility, because juggling the actions of a half-dozen or so small squads is certainly a lot more straightforward than managing giant swarms of them in
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