“Hordes of Hel is a gripping roguelike horde-survivor game set in the dark realms of Norse Mythology. Fight waves of enemies to earn divine blessings of ancient Viking Deities, explore hostile worlds and face powerful bosses. Become a god-like warrior in this ultimate showdown.” – Steam Description

Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel is survivors like and by that I, of course, mean Vampire Survivors like. It’s an autoshooter horde survival game where you play as one of 7 classes and create a build from over 9 different Gods across Norse Mythology. Utilizing this build you defeat an ever encroaching wave of enemies across 15 minutes which culminates in a boss battle.

---

Choose Your Fighter

---

Before you load into your chosen realm to fight the waves of enemies, you have to select your chosen class. There are 7 classes in total to choose from, with Conan the Barbarian being an 8^th class as a paid DLC. You start with two classes at the start, the Berserker and the Seeress. As you play through the game you will be able to unlock all the others without spending real life cash. I know it’s weird that I mention it, but this game DOES have cosmetic DLC for sale. Three of them in total at time of writing. I don’t have the Conan DLC to say whether or not Conan the Barbarian is overpowered enough to be “Pay2Win.” Conan is canonically strong so, even if he was, I don’t know that I’d mind it? Also there’s the whole… “this is a single player game” thing, but that’s a conversation for another article not this review. Aside from skins there are different weapons you can unlock. They are cosmetically different but each one has it’s own stat. For instance, the starting weapon for the berserker increases critical hit chance by 5%.

During your run, when you reach level 11, you will unlock a subclass which can let you double down on the playstyle you are going for. For example with the Berserker, you can choose the Zealot and take that sweet sweet God Skill cooldown if you are focusing on God Skills for your run, or the Battle Master if you’re just using your auto attack as a primary damaging style. When I was first starting out, I for sure picked the Troll Scion to help keep me alive. Hard to get currency for metaprogression if you’re butter-side down 6 minutes into your run.

After you beat your run, or even if you don’t, you’re greeted with a post battle report. On this report you can see which abilities you chose, which class, which difficulty, etc. Everything you’d need to review your build choices and I think the benefit of this is being able to show others like “Hey, this build really worked out for me, you should try it out!”

---

I’ve Got the Magic in Me

---

As standard with these types of games, you beat up enemies until experience crystals drop from their corpses. You hoover all those crystals up until you level. You can then select one of three possible paths. In Jotunnslayer, instead of just getting God powers, you can opt select upgrades for your specific class. This way you can really tailor your build to your liking. Sometimes you will see 1 class choice and 2 God choices, or just all 3 God choices. Once you select 3 different gods to receive benefits from you are only going to see those 3 gods for your run, so locking in your desired Deity in your first few level ups is really advised. Each God gives you choices of passives and actives that are thematic to them. For example, Thor will give you chain lightning on attacks or throwing Mjolnir, Skadi will let you shoot frozen arrows or freeze your enemies on attack, or Odin will let you summon Munin and Hugin to attack for you or give you bonuses to your experience gain. Personally, I liked using Skadi to slow/freeze enemies and Loki to poison enemies so they died with very little active intervention from me.

Now that you’re on your way to becoming the ultimate “God-Like Warrior” as the game calls you, you are prompted to select objectives on the map. These are randomly generated missions mid run that can require you to do tasks ranging from being asked to pick up 25 mushrooms, light 5 braziers, or kill 3 mini-bosses that you summon. They happen periodically throughout your 20 minute run and give you reasons to not just shimmy back and forth in one section of your screen.

Your final objective for each map is summoning the Jotun for that realm. You are playing JotunnSlayer after all, so obviously, we gotta get to slaying. You do have to GET to the spot on the map though to start the boss fight, so be mindful of that. I did fail a run or two because there wasn’t enough time for me to greedily get a chest on one side of the map AND make it to start the boss fight on the other. The boss fights themselves are all unique and have different mechanics which is neat, but they don’t change on difficulties. Not that they should just thought it’d be nice to add a new mechanic rather than more health or damage.

---

Glorious Evolution

---

After you’ve completed your runs, win or lose, you’ll convert the gold you got into currency for the different skill trees. As you were leveling, I’m sure you saw that there were 4 upgrade blips when selecting a god’s power, or even your class power. Before you interact with these skill trees you may have noticed you can only select 3 of those blips. In this tree you can unlock an advanced version of the skill. Jotunnslayer doesn’t have evolutions and fusions like you might see from other Survivors-likes but it has this system instead. Each god has their own skill tree and you can even select which abilities have the 4th evolution blip on them. There are passives for your character throughout all of the god’s trees so even if you like to only use Thor and Freya for your run, you should still take a peek at the passives in the other god’s trees.

You can get more currency for these trees from completing runs. You can also play on different difficulties for more currency than normal. If that’s too easy, as you play, you can unlock a rune system which can modify your runs difficulties like Hade’s Heat System or Risk of Rain 2’s Artifacts.

---

• Graphics– The graphics for this are realistic and gritty. At first, it was a turnoff to me, I have a preconceived notion that games like this are just using plug and play assets from the Unity Store, but the more I played it the more it made sense. The realism and grit combined with their special effects for magic and abilities came together to be a pretty cohesive package.
• Gameplay– Gameplay is as you’d expect from the survivors genre at an aerial view. This one has it’s own flavor which sets it apart. The ability to focus entirely on your selected class and make a build with no god powers, or “oops all god powers” means you can really make different builds every run. (There might even be some achievements for these different playstyles for those with an eye for such things)
• Sound– Sound design works well, nothing special, but nothing egregiously wrong or standout.
• Controls– Controls felt as you’d expect, WASD to move, Spacebar to dodge, and each class has it’s own special ability on Q.
• Story– Nonexistent, as you’d expect for a survivors-like. I don’t think anyone comes to a game like this for a gripping narrative.