Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel

The pitch

Hordes of Hel takes the Vampire Survivors formula — stand in a field, mow down escalating waves of enemies, pick up power-ups between waves, get exponentially stronger over a run — and dresses it in Norse mythology. You fight for the favour of Viking gods, collect their blessings, and push back the forces of Hel across increasingly hostile realms. It's a crowded genre by 2026, and this entry's pitch is specifically about standing out visually where its rivals mostly don't try to.

The one thing almost nobody disputes

Across a hundred of the most-helpful negative reviews, "graphics" appears 27 times — nearly always as a compliment offered before the actual complaint. "Love the graphics," opens the single most-upvoted negative review on the page, before going on to explain why the underlying loop didn't hold their attention. A positive review frames the whole pitch in one line: "Do you ever find yourself wishing Vampire Survivors had better graphics than the 1980s?" This is a genre where visual presentation is usually an afterthought, and Hordes of Hel's reviewers — across both recommendation columns — treat its art direction as the one settled fact about the game.

What the reviewers who tried to defend it against the criticism found

The most interesting data point in this corpus isn't the split between positive and negative reviews, it's a specific pattern inside the positive column: reviewers who say they went in specifically to test whether the "all style, no substance" criticism was fair. One writes, "I was almost put off this game by the negative reviews. People were saying this was very mediocre — to which, after playing, I am so very confused by that c[riticism]" and comes down positive. But several others run the same experiment and land the opposite way, describing meta-progression that maxes out fast, skill trees that stop offering meaningful choices after the first run, and class balance so lopsided that one detailed review calls the bow character "the only viable class all the way through" and says the game is "in need of A LOT of balancing." Read together, both outcomes are legitimate reports from real playtime rather than one side simply being wrong — this is a game whose depth genuinely runs out faster for some builds and playstyles than others.

Steam Deck: a real, ongoing complaint

Performance on Steam Deck is a specific, recurring sore point rather than a vague one. A June 2026 review — nearly a year after launch — reports the game "absolutely unplayable on Steam Deck. Laggy as hell" and argues "Valve should remove the 'Steam Deck Verified' badge." This isn't an isolated launch-week bug report; Steam Deck performance complaints appear across the review timeline into 2026, which is worth knowing before buying specifically for handheld play.

Development hasn't stopped

To the developers' credit, Hordes of Hel has kept growing well past its September 2025 full release. The Steam news feed shows hotfixes through May 2026, a paid Conan crossover DLC and a free local co-op update for up to four players in April 2026 — directly answering a request several reviewers made explicitly ("for the love of the Allfather, make it coop") — and, most recently, a Nintendo Switch 2 launch on 30 July 2026, less than two weeks before this review. A game still being actively expanded and ported nearly a year after 1.0 is a meaningfully different proposition than one that shipped and went quiet.

Where the numbers land

Recent English sentiment (the 100 most recent reviews, spanning June to August 2026) sits at 83% positive, essentially matching the 84.9% lifetime score — there's no erosion in reception since launch. Achievement data shows a typical roguelite curve: the most-earned sit around 50–59% completion, and the median across 38 achievements is 13.35%, with the deepest challenge-run achievements under 2%. That's consistent with a game most buyers enjoy for a solid stretch without necessarily exhausting everything it offers — which lines up with the "great for the first 5–10 hours" framing several reviewers independently reach for.

Value

At NZ$21.99 with active, multi-platform ongoing support and one free major content update (co-op) added after launch, this sits at a fair price for what it currently offers, even with the progression complaints factored in. The optional DLC is cosmetic and crossover content, not anything gating core systems.

Verdict

Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel earns its reputation as the best-looking game in a genre that rarely tries this hard visually, and its developers have kept building rather than walking away after launch. What it hasn't fully solved is the thing that keeps horde-survivors in rotation for hundreds of hours — build variety and meaningful meta-progression — and its own reviewers, even ones who set out specifically to defend it, keep landing on that same gap. Buy it for the setting and the visuals. Don't expect it to out-build Vampire Survivors or Brotato yet.