Valorborn Review - A Medieval Kenshi That Is Choking On Its Own Ambition
I desperately wanted this to be the brutal medieval sandbox that ruins my sleep schedule, but right now, it is just ruining my patience.
Here we are in 2026, and a certain highly anticipated sequel from Lo-Fi Games is still nowhere to be seen. Nature abhors a vacuum. Into that void steps Valorborn, a wildly ambitious medieval fantasy sandbox RPG that wears its inspirations proudly on its blood-soaked sleeves. The pitch is intoxicating. You are dropped into a fully enterable world as a nobody. You can be a thief, a sellsword, a hunter, or just a miserable peasant trying not to starve. You build a party, establish camps, influence faction conflicts, and carve out a life in a world that fundamentally does not care about you.
I love games that treat me like dirt. I love the grind of starting with nothing and clawing my way up to regional dominance. Valorborn promises exactly that, wrapped in a rather pretty Unreal Engine package. But after spending hours wrestling with its systems, getting my head caved in by omniscient guards, and watching my hard-earned crafting materials vanish into the digital ether, I have to give it to you straight. This is not an Early Access game. This is a pre-alpha tech demo, and it is nowhere near ready for your hard-earned cash.
The Illusion of a Living World
The core appeal of a sandbox RPG is the simulation. The developers boast about AI characters following day and night routines, dynamic faction tension, and a world that reacts to danger. In practice, the current state of Valorborn feels incredibly hollow.
When I stumbled into my first major town, I expected to see a bustling medieval economy. Instead, I found generic, nameless NPCs marching up and down the street on completely fixed, scripted paths. They do not interact with the shops. They do not talk to each other. When night falls, they march to a bed and rotate rigidly onto the mattress. If you venture out to the bandit camps, you will find the exact same sterile environment. Bandits stand frozen in their designated guard spots until you enter their aggro radius. They do not send out raiding parties or interact with their own environment.
The illusion breaks entirely the moment you try to engage with the crime system. I attempted to sell some items I scrounged up from the wilderness. Suddenly, a guard halfway across the town decided I was carrying stolen goods, engaged a global aggro switch, and rushed over to permanently end my run. There is no nuance here. In similar games, getting caught means getting thrown in a cage, serving your time, and perhaps picking the lock to escape. You learn from failure. In Valorborn, failure just means a fast track to the game over screen.
Loot Generation and Exploration
Exploring a fully enterable world sounds fantastic until you realize there is very little worth finding. I sneaked into a large enemy encampment, picked the locks on several chests, and found absolutely nothing. The loot tables feel severely undercooked. A massive bandit stronghold might yield a single piece of cloth and a few coins. If the game wants to sell me on a simulated economy, NPCs need to actually own and use the items they possess, rather than relying on randomized, empty containers.
Fighting the Interface
When I am not getting instantly murdered by psychic guards, I am fighting a user interface that feels actively hostile. There are no hotkeys for the most basic functions. You want to open your map? Do not bother pressing M. You have to drag your mouse over to a tiny UI icon and click it. When the map opens, it dominates the screen, and you cannot press Escape to close it. You have to manually click the X in the corner. It is exhausting.
Inventory management is a crucial part of survival games, and Valorborn uses a grid-based system where items have physical dimensions. This is fine in theory, but the rotation mechanics frequently break. You are left trying to awkwardly drop items on the floor and pick them back up just to force the game to auto-sort them into your backpack. And speaking of backpacks, I bought a large one only to discover a bug that restricted me to placing exactly one item inside it, rendering the purchase entirely useless.
The Job Board From Hell
Eventually, you will recruit some companions to help share the burden. Valorborn features an automated job system where you can assign tasks to your squad. It is a fantastic idea that currently functions like absolute spaghetti code.
I told one of my new recruits to chop wood to supply my fledgling camp. He decided to take this as a holy crusade and proceeded to chop down every single tree in the entire zip code, completely ignoring his other assigned tasks. When I tried to switch between characters to fix his queue, the entire job list just deleted itself. You are forced to heavily micromanage every single action, which completely defeats the purpose of an automation system.
Base Building and Crafting Woes
If you have the patience to gather materials, you can start building a camp. This is where the bugs escalate from annoying to genuinely game-breaking.
The saving system is completely unreliable right now. I spent a grueling hour chopping wood, building a carpentry table, and placing the blueprints for a small shelter. I saved my game and took a break. When I loaded back in, my completed carpentry table had reverted to a glowing green blueprint, demanding all the resources I had already spent.
Even when the crafting stations do work, they are a massive gamble. I loaded materials into a workbench to craft essential supplies. The bench consumed my raw materials, the crafting timer ticked down, and then nothing happened. No product was generated. The materials were just gone. In a game where every single resource is a struggle to obtain, having your time and effort deleted by a glitch is a massive slap in the face.
The Silver Lining
I know I am being harsh. I have to be. You work hard for your money, and charging over twenty dollars for a game in this state is a bold move. But I also need to make something very clear.
The bones of this game are incredible.
When the lighting hits the dense forests just right, the Unreal Engine graphics look phenomenal. The ambient sound design is genuinely immersive. The sheer volume of craftable items, weapons, and armor shows that the developers have a massive, intricate vision for this world. In the fleeting moments where the mechanics actually sync up, where my squad is sitting around a campfire after surviving a brutal skirmish, I can see the masterpiece hiding underneath the jank. The developers are clearly passionate, and they have already pushed out hotfixes addressing some of the community's loudest complaints.
The Verdict
Valorborn is a diamond buried under a mountain of rough, jagged code. The ambition on display is staggering, and I genuinely believe that in a year or two, this could be the definitive medieval survival sandbox experience. But right now? It is a buggy, frustrating mess that will test your sanity more than your survival skills. The tutorials soft-lock, the saving system deletes your progress, the AI is brain-dead, and the UI is a chore to navigate.
Do not buy this game today unless you are fully prepared to treat it as a paid alpha test to support a small studio. Add it to your wishlist, follow the development updates, and let the developers cook. This stew needs way more time on the fire before it is ready to be served.
Score: 4.5/10 - A brilliant medieval vision currently drowning in game-breaking bugs.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.
