Viking: Battle for Asgard Review (X360)

I’ll admit it, I was checking out gamefaqs for how to proceed in this game’s second island. Quite a lot of the time when reviewing games you don’t have to incentive, patience or time to explore the landscape for a few hours like some will happily do to make the most of their latest game purchase. When you don’t pay for a game, have a deadline for reviewing and want to get some way further into the game before passing judgement there’s less fear in wrecking a moment of discovery after 15 minutes of trying than if you want this Single Player only game to justify its worth.

I just wanted to know whether or not by killing the guard I’d stopped him somehow enabling my progress, perhaps by performing a special knock on the nearby door that he friends would open for him and I could charge through, decapitating, slaughtering and generally bathing myself in the gratuitous blood of the demon spawn of Hel (that’s with one l; the character rather than the place). It turns out there was a small passage visible on the map to get where I wanted that I hadn’t checked out fully.

I’ll get to the point soon… promise

So the game is only just out, and no-one has written a FAQ yet (phew, the review’s not too late), and I saunter over to the message boards to see if anyone else has had a similar problem, and there is an abundance of people claiming that this or that review is wrong; more so than every game bar ‘The Club’ recently. You see, most reviewers will rate on whether or not a game is ‘good’ by its merits and weigh them up against any flaws, but this ignores the strange factor present in rare games where people can really enjoy a bad game because of something special within it. The review says it’s bad, yet the fans claim it’s wrong because they really enjoy it.

Not to say that Viking: Battle of Asgard (I’m not typing that every time) is a bad game, but it has some bad features that some will consider push it over the edge of a quality product and some will overlook for the fun they gain in playing through. Now how about we start talking about what the game is all about?

Viking(s)

Unsurprisingly a horde of Vikings (yourself included) are trying to free the land from the aforementioned Hel, God of the Underworld, with the help of Freya, another more friendly God and some other story that I found mostly irrelevant and hardly poignant (aside from the fact that Brian Blessed narrates!). Essentially it’s an excuse for lots of undead Vikings called The Legion to battle you in various areas to take control of three large islands.

Quite traditionally of the Hack & Slash genre, Viking (that’s the game) gives you control of Skarin, a seemingly immortal champion of the goodies. As unfair as that sounds (it is), the gameplay mechanic seems in place to ensure that you can simply respawn and retry a failed section again rather than have to die and reload under less than fortunate circumstances. Combat wise there are quite a few moves that must be purchased to learn, but even with them all you’ll likely just use a few of them, dodging, blocking and your standard attack button mashing to get through even the toughest of sections.

More mechanics of battle

Soon, you’ll be able to imbue runes onto your weapon to use magical elemental power against your enemies, and this increases your strength of attack and freezes or burns whomever you are fighting in different but useful ways. Each enemy you defeat refills your magic, and if you’re skilled enough (it’s really not that hard) to perform an impressive fatality move you’ll get three times as much magic energy.

The battle system is satisfying and brutal, with the now classic health recharge in effect when you’re away from danger, and develops nicely if you feel the need to keep adding to your skills and runes, although in all likelihood you’ll not make a special journey to learn extras unless you happen to be nearby and this can make the action quite repetitive.

Exploring the Islands

The game takes place over three progressively more complicated island layouts (with the final one being the obligatory ‘ice level’), and wonderfully never takes you away from the action to a loading screen for the entirety of the island. They are all quite large and contain a series of tasks that must be accomplished to continue, from freeing a load of captured friends to blowing up enemy barracks in the heart of their cities.

Repeating in style but not in content between the islands, the ‘missions’ can be accomplished in different orders depending on how you explore your open world, and it definitely gives the illusion of more freedom than you really have. The paths branch out briefly only to rejoin at an important moment and branch out again. That said, this works well to structure the game into more of a methodical and varied experience. Each task can generally be accomplished in different ways too, by approaching an enemy encampment from different sides, or even sneaking through and releasing your friends to allow them to mop up the rest of the Legion in the area.

It’s a large world after all

Littering the landscape are ‘Leystones’ that when discovered allow you to warp between them in a very useful ‘Oblivion’ style that avoids repetitive journeys across each landscape allowing you to focus on the discovery of new areas and tasks. When you’ve rescued enough friends and made enough of a dent in the enemy’s defence, you’ll be able to launch a full assault on the next city in your path. This takes the form of an enormous Lord Of The Rings scale battle with seemingly hundreds of troops on screen at once, all laying into each other in an attempt to wipe each other out.

When this first happens it is a surprise and at a scale that it is easy to marvel at. You’ll be running around the area trying to follow the tasks that Freya sets you that will make a significant difference in the battle. As the game progresses, you realise that these battles are actually simple linear ‘defeat the next enemy now’ tasks structured into something that feels a lot more interesting, and thankfully they do so you’ll forgive this gameplay necessity when a crowd of friendlies are flung back by a huge champion as you approach and everyone parts for you two to square off until you’ve caused enough damage to start a sequential button hitting ‘Quick Time Event’ that finishes him off.

Oh, there are dragons too

Then you’ll earn yourself enough respect (essentially) with your allied dragon(s) to instruct them to help you out with your battle and kill the next ‘big’ enemy for you. It is at this point that you may realise that while your task is to take out the enemy Shaman, until you do it, neither side will progress in the battle. Each side has Shamans that will resurrect troops (including you) apparently indefinitely until you defeat your specific opponents. It is a shame that you can’t simply fight the standard troops well enough for your friends to flood the main enemy and help you out there, but it seems to be a one man band at each Shaman or Champion, your allies acting as background help rather than making a real difference to the battle.

While being ever-resurrected may sound like it creates an impossible-to-lose scenario, the game’s background troop action ensures that you do not resort to Bioshock’s Vita Chamber activities where you might reach an enemy, hack at him until you die, and respawn to do the same thing until he keels over. Indeed the very end of the game gives you a solo mission to climb the largest tower and defeat foes on the way up. The hardest moment in the game for me was a Champion up this tower that had a rather unforgiving checkpoint before it. The end boss was a bit of a let down in the end, starting well, but ultimately being a simple combination of two existing enemies behaviours in sequence.

Why is this a bad game?

The end of the game, the lack of any story I might care about and the slightly repetitive action didn’t bother me, however. An annoying camera system that tends to follow your controls and then immediately bounce back towards its origins tops my list. You’ll get it into positions where it’ll block your viewpoint… in a practically empty field, and curse at its uselessness when you’re trying to explore caves.

Then there are the sound issues. Climbing rope sounds like it has been treated with some kind of alarm system that boosts the volume up to your system’s maximum (while not alerting nearby enemies) and then you’ll kick open a massive gate only to have it remain entirely silent, but ultimately this wasn’t enough to tarnish the game for me. Sure many aspects of Viking should have been done better, but with some great visuals and some heart poundingly dramatic music (and some questionable voice over accents) the game remains a strong and entertaining experience for the amount of time you’re able to stand it. If you’re teetering on the edge of it being your kind of game, rent it without a second thought, but don’t expect to play it through again unless you’re hunting achievements for completing it on the harder difficulty (and it doesn’t seem that different to me).