I’ve been casting about for something to fill the void since I completed Fallout 3, and so my brother’s timely gift of Viking: The Battle for Asgard has me wandering around hacking at anything in my path with a sword and an axe.
When I first found this game on the store shelf, I was actually picking up Conan, and the sales assistant told me that Viking was very much a similar game. That is very mucha simplistic comparison. Sure, they both involve muscle-bound protagonists in a third-person hack ‘n slash fest, but that’s about where the similarities end.
Conan was based on a great franchise, with an original script that stayed fairly true to Howard’s ideas. The voice acting was great, and the action never stopped. I had a great time, and would have replayed it, were it not for the stupid number of quicktime events.
Viking, on the other hand, is an open-world experience that tries to mesh the side scrolling hacker that Conan is based on with RPG-style quests. The result is a bunch of simplistic quests that require you to do a lot more running than fighting.
Your character can also learn moves, something like Conan‘s experience system, but they are pretty simplistic by comparison, and as soon as you learn to parry opponents’ moves, you’re pretty safe. Mass battles are kind of fun, especially when you activate your sword runes and all your allies’ weapons gain the same elemental properties (fire, ice or lightning). The combat is slower, and while it’s probably more violent, it’s just not as engaging as Conan.
One thing I hated about Conan was the game’s dependence on quicktime events to engage the player in dramatic action scenes. They were fun to watch, but I hated having to redo the same thing ten fucking times before getting through it. Viking also borrows here. Boss fights often involve wearing the opponent down and then engaging in button mashing in the hope that you’ll get the bastard to stay down.
The story also seems a bit boring. None of your allies really trust you, but you have to dick around in the manual to figure out why. Obviously, you don’t really need to worry about that since you can’t say anything in the “dialogues”, but I still find it grating when they talk about me being possessed, or having fits, and how I can’t be trusted, and then having to trek half way across the island because they’re too scared to look for a flagon of mead themselves.
Anyway, Viking looks like it’s going to be pretty short, so I’ll play it to the end, but I don’t expect anything to write home about.