Edit: Since Gigantor's review (a good read) is a list of negative things about Viking, consider this a more positive review of Viking, insofar as I actually like the game despite its flaws.
As anyone with their ear to the winds in the last few years would know, the makers of the Total War series; Creative Assembly, were a couple years ago bought by SEGA. As part of this soul selling deal they now have to churn out third person action games as well as their beloved Total War franchise. First came Spartan: Total Warrior which stuck you in the role of kicking ass as a shirtless hack n? slasher, & had a story involving gods, Greeks & Romans. Viking: Battle for Asguard is similar in this respect as you play a shirtless muscular Viking hack n? slasher in a story involving gods, Vikings & monster things (The Legion).
First things first, if like me you still read Gamespot, you?ll know their reviewer tore this game apart & gave it a 5.0. You may also notice that a lot of player reviews there disagree with this, & to a certain extent I?m one of them. Viking isn?t a bad game, considering its made by a company that?s only done one other 3rd person action adventure hack n? slash game before its quite a good attempt.
The story is simple but not very well presented. You are Skarin, a Viking warrior chosen by the goddess Freya as her champion to fight back the goddess Hel?s evil forces (the Legion) & recapture Midguard. There are three islands in Midguard of increasing size which you liberate one at a time as you progress. This basically involves you having one or two key battle missions which requires you to complete a series of other ?quests? to increase your army size & find specific items (dragon summoning amulets for example) that you need to activate the battle mission. That?s all there really is to it. It is rather repetitive, with each island really just being a bigger version of the last one, but I still found it fun enough to want to keep pushing onto the end. There is more to the story, your character has sudden visions which make very little sense, & there are cut scenes (both done in a graphic novel style) to break up the gameplay. But the only thing that stops you pushing the skip button during these is the fact Brian Blessed narrates. For all the potential lore & mythology that could be drawn on, it?s a shame Vikings story is confusing, uninteresting, & completely ignorable.
If your wondering where the Open-Ended world that is promised on the back of the box is, its right there. You don?t do each ?quest? in a lineal order. The game says ?here is the battle site, here?s what you need to do to activate it, have fun.? Of course there isn?t really anything else to do besides these; all camps, caves & villages are pretty much connected to the main story & there is only bags of gold, barrels of ale & red skulls (though what these are for is anyone?s guess, I only ever fond one & that was by accident) to find outside of that. Now this you might say is betraying the claim of an Open-Ended world but I don?t think so. You are free to go wherever you want on the island (although the second & third islands are split into halves for which u have to complete one battle site to open the 2nd half), approaching objectives how you want, to a limited extent, & explore at your leisure. There may only be gold to find (for which you can purchase maps to show you on minimap where the gold is hidden) but gold is all you need to buy things with, & since you don?t get paid for questing there?s an incentive enough to look for it.
There is no real inventory in Viking. You have a sword & an Axe (which you might as well consider as one weapon), you can carry throwing axes, health potions & fire pots (grenades). That?s it. Any other of the few items you come across are specific only to the story objectives & you don?t really control when they are used. However, I personally think this limited number of items works for the game, since having lots of random weapons etc isn?t the focus or necessary. The only problem I had with it is the fact that you are limited to three health potions. Now limiting health potions is understandable as you can find so much gold you could easily buy so many as to make you unkillable. But since potions are piss weak till the final island, & you can quite easily run out of them on the last one, having only 3 will see you occasionally cross the line from challenging to frustrating. However, since death is pretty inconsequential, even a good tactical choice for the big battles, & also when you really need it health orbs often appear from the Legion you kill, health potions aren?t that big of an issue.
But if your not buying & finding weapons then what are you spending all that gold on? Skarin never changes his weapons, but he can learn a large variety of fighting moves. These you acquire from the battle arena & range from slow, powerful, shield braking hits, to fast but weak thrusts & slashes. My personal favourite is the counter attack where you dodge an incoming attack &, if timed right, proceed to slash the attacker in half. While its quite doable to play Viking by just button bashing, these learnt moves are fun to use, & in some instances can be a big help. Sadly in the big battles, there really isn?t much scope for using them as the battlefield is so crowded you really just run & hack your way to your objectives. You also get to use elemental attacks; fire ice & lightning. These can be upgraded by a blacksmith (dunno why a blacksmith) to be more powerful, & require rage, which comes in the form of red orbs dropped by the Legion you slay, to use. Again, this is useful in certain situations, the ice one in particular is useful when there?s a large group of Legion attacking, though you can go for most of the game without using them (I never used the lightning one).
The big battle missions that you activate when completing all its pre-required goals look impressive. Hundreds of Vikings & monsters fighting tooth, nail & claw. However, when actually fighting they often devolve into you button mashing your way towards boss objectives then dodging all other enemies while focusing on them. The objectives in these battles come in two forms. The main one is usually to kill the Legion Shaman, monsters that summon new Legion soldiers to replace the dead. They are defended by a shield powered by a circle of magic stick things that you need to smash in order to kill the shaman themselves. However, these shaman are usually so heavily guarded that getting to them is pretty hard. This is made worse by the games complete indecision about which target to lock. You can be hurriedly smashing at one of the sticks, when suddenly you see your self thrusting at a completely different target. When the enemies are crowding round you, this happens a lot & is very frustrating.
However, if you cant hack n? slash your way to the shaman you can take them out another way. The Dragons that you summon can be ordered to attack & kill the shaman for you, but you need Runestones to get them to do so. These you can get by killing the other boss enemies on the battlefield. This usually involves you button mashing the quick attack button & dodging the enemies blows until you see a B button icon appear on that enemy. Pressing it sends you into a QTE where you have to press the right buttons in order to kill the boss. While in standard difficulty mode these were pretty easy, they were quite fun to do, although there isn?t much variety (either in the QTE's or the bosses themselves).
Repetitive is a word that can rightly be used to describe Viking: Battle for Asguard. But how repetitive it seems depends on how you play it. If you just hack & slash your way through ignoring all the combo moves & doing objectives in the order they?re presented to you, then Viking quickly becomes boringly repetitive. If you try & spice it up, by using stealth (Skarin will crouch when near hostiles who havent seen him & can do powerful killmoves when close enough to unsupection Legion) where you can & the different fighting moves etc, then a fair amount of that tedious repetition is lost. Similarly, if you don?t try & complete the entire game in one sitting the repetitive nature of each island becomes less negative of a feature. Viking is pretty light on features & pretty shallow story wise: if it can be called an RPG at all it is only a casual one. But, like with Fable, if you don?t let yourself get carried away by the promises the game makes (epic battles, open-ended world of exploration etc) you?ll find what there actually is in Viking enjoyable, certainly worth more than the grilling the Gamespot reviewer gave it. Maybe if I played more action adventure games Id be more inclined to not like it, but I pay very little attention to this genre so when I do pick up such games I have les prejudice against its flaws.
That said, I wouldn?t recommend buying it, at least not at full retail price. I rented it by chance when I was randomly looking at what was in Blockbusters, & definitely suggest renting as the best option. it?s a decent game despite its flaws but is not particularly long & lacks any real replay-ability, which for me is the difference between paying £6 & £40 to play a game.
As anyone with their ear to the winds in the last few years would know, the makers of the Total War series; Creative Assembly, were a couple years ago bought by SEGA. As part of this soul selling deal they now have to churn out third person action games as well as their beloved Total War franchise. First came Spartan: Total Warrior which stuck you in the role of kicking ass as a shirtless hack n? slasher, & had a story involving gods, Greeks & Romans. Viking: Battle for Asguard is similar in this respect as you play a shirtless muscular Viking hack n? slasher in a story involving gods, Vikings & monster things (The Legion).
First things first, if like me you still read Gamespot, you?ll know their reviewer tore this game apart & gave it a 5.0. You may also notice that a lot of player reviews there disagree with this, & to a certain extent I?m one of them. Viking isn?t a bad game, considering its made by a company that?s only done one other 3rd person action adventure hack n? slash game before its quite a good attempt.
The story is simple but not very well presented. You are Skarin, a Viking warrior chosen by the goddess Freya as her champion to fight back the goddess Hel?s evil forces (the Legion) & recapture Midguard. There are three islands in Midguard of increasing size which you liberate one at a time as you progress. This basically involves you having one or two key battle missions which requires you to complete a series of other ?quests? to increase your army size & find specific items (dragon summoning amulets for example) that you need to activate the battle mission. That?s all there really is to it. It is rather repetitive, with each island really just being a bigger version of the last one, but I still found it fun enough to want to keep pushing onto the end. There is more to the story, your character has sudden visions which make very little sense, & there are cut scenes (both done in a graphic novel style) to break up the gameplay. But the only thing that stops you pushing the skip button during these is the fact Brian Blessed narrates. For all the potential lore & mythology that could be drawn on, it?s a shame Vikings story is confusing, uninteresting, & completely ignorable.
If your wondering where the Open-Ended world that is promised on the back of the box is, its right there. You don?t do each ?quest? in a lineal order. The game says ?here is the battle site, here?s what you need to do to activate it, have fun.? Of course there isn?t really anything else to do besides these; all camps, caves & villages are pretty much connected to the main story & there is only bags of gold, barrels of ale & red skulls (though what these are for is anyone?s guess, I only ever fond one & that was by accident) to find outside of that. Now this you might say is betraying the claim of an Open-Ended world but I don?t think so. You are free to go wherever you want on the island (although the second & third islands are split into halves for which u have to complete one battle site to open the 2nd half), approaching objectives how you want, to a limited extent, & explore at your leisure. There may only be gold to find (for which you can purchase maps to show you on minimap where the gold is hidden) but gold is all you need to buy things with, & since you don?t get paid for questing there?s an incentive enough to look for it.
There is no real inventory in Viking. You have a sword & an Axe (which you might as well consider as one weapon), you can carry throwing axes, health potions & fire pots (grenades). That?s it. Any other of the few items you come across are specific only to the story objectives & you don?t really control when they are used. However, I personally think this limited number of items works for the game, since having lots of random weapons etc isn?t the focus or necessary. The only problem I had with it is the fact that you are limited to three health potions. Now limiting health potions is understandable as you can find so much gold you could easily buy so many as to make you unkillable. But since potions are piss weak till the final island, & you can quite easily run out of them on the last one, having only 3 will see you occasionally cross the line from challenging to frustrating. However, since death is pretty inconsequential, even a good tactical choice for the big battles, & also when you really need it health orbs often appear from the Legion you kill, health potions aren?t that big of an issue.
But if your not buying & finding weapons then what are you spending all that gold on? Skarin never changes his weapons, but he can learn a large variety of fighting moves. These you acquire from the battle arena & range from slow, powerful, shield braking hits, to fast but weak thrusts & slashes. My personal favourite is the counter attack where you dodge an incoming attack &, if timed right, proceed to slash the attacker in half. While its quite doable to play Viking by just button bashing, these learnt moves are fun to use, & in some instances can be a big help. Sadly in the big battles, there really isn?t much scope for using them as the battlefield is so crowded you really just run & hack your way to your objectives. You also get to use elemental attacks; fire ice & lightning. These can be upgraded by a blacksmith (dunno why a blacksmith) to be more powerful, & require rage, which comes in the form of red orbs dropped by the Legion you slay, to use. Again, this is useful in certain situations, the ice one in particular is useful when there?s a large group of Legion attacking, though you can go for most of the game without using them (I never used the lightning one).
The big battle missions that you activate when completing all its pre-required goals look impressive. Hundreds of Vikings & monsters fighting tooth, nail & claw. However, when actually fighting they often devolve into you button mashing your way towards boss objectives then dodging all other enemies while focusing on them. The objectives in these battles come in two forms. The main one is usually to kill the Legion Shaman, monsters that summon new Legion soldiers to replace the dead. They are defended by a shield powered by a circle of magic stick things that you need to smash in order to kill the shaman themselves. However, these shaman are usually so heavily guarded that getting to them is pretty hard. This is made worse by the games complete indecision about which target to lock. You can be hurriedly smashing at one of the sticks, when suddenly you see your self thrusting at a completely different target. When the enemies are crowding round you, this happens a lot & is very frustrating.
However, if you cant hack n? slash your way to the shaman you can take them out another way. The Dragons that you summon can be ordered to attack & kill the shaman for you, but you need Runestones to get them to do so. These you can get by killing the other boss enemies on the battlefield. This usually involves you button mashing the quick attack button & dodging the enemies blows until you see a B button icon appear on that enemy. Pressing it sends you into a QTE where you have to press the right buttons in order to kill the boss. While in standard difficulty mode these were pretty easy, they were quite fun to do, although there isn?t much variety (either in the QTE's or the bosses themselves).
Repetitive is a word that can rightly be used to describe Viking: Battle for Asguard. But how repetitive it seems depends on how you play it. If you just hack & slash your way through ignoring all the combo moves & doing objectives in the order they?re presented to you, then Viking quickly becomes boringly repetitive. If you try & spice it up, by using stealth (Skarin will crouch when near hostiles who havent seen him & can do powerful killmoves when close enough to unsupection Legion) where you can & the different fighting moves etc, then a fair amount of that tedious repetition is lost. Similarly, if you don?t try & complete the entire game in one sitting the repetitive nature of each island becomes less negative of a feature. Viking is pretty light on features & pretty shallow story wise: if it can be called an RPG at all it is only a casual one. But, like with Fable, if you don?t let yourself get carried away by the promises the game makes (epic battles, open-ended world of exploration etc) you?ll find what there actually is in Viking enjoyable, certainly worth more than the grilling the Gamespot reviewer gave it. Maybe if I played more action adventure games Id be more inclined to not like it, but I pay very little attention to this genre so when I do pick up such games I have les prejudice against its flaws.
That said, I wouldn?t recommend buying it, at least not at full retail price. I rented it by chance when I was randomly looking at what was in Blockbusters, & definitely suggest renting as the best option. it?s a decent game despite its flaws but is not particularly long & lacks any real replay-ability, which for me is the difference between paying £6 & £40 to play a game.
