Viking: Battle For Midgard is a sort of obscure niche game that came out in 2008 and I played it around that time, think I thought it was a decent campy button masher third person combat game so I decided to do another play through of it now in 2022
The first thing that strikes you is that it feels a little rough around the edges
While first impressions arent bad per se, its a mixed bag.
In that some of the animations look stiff, and especially some elements of the UI look a little uncared for, such as the default windows text fonts in places.
But still, it shows promise.
The graphics are decent enough, notably the sprawling long waves of water that surround the islands you explore, it does have a nice touch of atmosphere to it with the sound effects and the way the water graphics look.
There are two difficulties it presents you with
Normal & Hard
I choose normal, because fuck playing this on hardest difficulty.
You quickly discover the main core of the gameplay in Viking:
It gives you three main islands,
then you open up the map and look at the Objective icons, you then set a marker on one of them in any order you wish, and slowly walk towards it and do what it requires.
You complete all of these objective icons, and then you unlock the final big battle for the island, which consists of huge amounts of NPC's on the screen, both friendly AI and enemy, which is pretty visually impressive the sheer number of AI on the screen.
In the final big battle of each island, it consists of killing the 'Shamans' which endlessly respawn enemies, you kill them by attacking these magical swords that surround them.
Or the big battle the other objective is to kill Giant trolls.
Each of the 3 islands have this exact same pattern and repetitive gameplay cycle. And even the big battles at the end of each island dont really differ that much.
The game is incredibly repetiive and to be frank pretty shallow.
So for example, on the starter island, as you walk around to these objective icons on your map, it usually brings you to something like "Free the captive prisoners from this encampment" so you go there and kill the enemies around the prisoners, then you spam B to open the prisoner cell and free them.
Then, theres a main captain guy that you talk to. He'll usually tell you to do some fetch quest like walk half across the map and pickup something like a jar of honey or something stupid for him.
The problem is, this same sort of exact same fetch quest gets repeated like 100 times.
It's always like you go to some camp, free the prisoner, talk to the main guy, go do a fetch quest involving nothing but talking to NPC's, then walking back.
This is especially egregiously annoying because this game , as far as im concerned, has a really annoying 'flaw'
The character movement speed is stupidly slow, theres no sprint button, or fast travel on command.
You can fast travel, but only at select waypoints.
Most of this game is spent holding the analog stick Up while you wait for your guy to traverse 10 minutes across big barren empty fields to get to the next objective or NPC fetch quest.
I think they made the movement speed so slow on purpose to try to pointlessly pad out the length of the game to hide the fact that its so shallow and without much content.
So thats really all the game consists of.
Theres a few 'archetype' objectives, but they just get repeated over and over again, until end credits.
Other examples of objectives it likes to repeat is :
'go clear out this watchtower'
go get the dragon amulet'
'go free the prisoners'
'Press X to warp here and do an Ambush instance where you get put in a linear arena and just mash buttons until everyone is dead"
There are some really counter intuitive and stupid parts like having to do these big stupid 'stealth' sections to sneak around one of the main fortresses, before the final big battles, and sneaking all the way in and grabbing some item, and sneaking out. This was so unobvious and awkward the first time cause it seemed like the game just wanted me to run straight into the fortress by myself and expected me to killl 1000 enemies by myself, but no, you have to find a side area or broken wall to enter, and then try to do this clumsy stealthing around and avoidng detection, which is about as awful and underdeveloped as it sounds.
This game does have 'stealth' but its just pure shit.
It happens automatically, your character will just randomly put his weapons away and start crouching around
It's just bad
Luckily you dont really have to do it all that often, but those sections where it wants you to sneak into the giant fortress by yourself to grab some item really sucked.
It's not that big of a deal but the game can feel really repetetive and dull, especially coupled with the slow movement speed and no fast travel
Infact, frequently i'd just throw myself off a cliff to die, because its faster than walking back to the nearest waypoint.
Also, I said the game was rough around the edges? yeah, theres no 'game over' or 'you died' screen, you just die and it instantly warps you to a waypoint without any notice, its jarring.
So the game is a 2008, action 'adventure' quasi open-world non linear game, where it has three islands, one after another (but you cant travel in between them, the islands happen linearly) where you complete the same handful of objectives (in whatever order you want) and then do the same repeat 'big battle' at the end.
Is it fun?
Kind of.
The combat is obviously the main draw here, because theres really not much point to 'explore'
There's no special gear you can find, or experience or level ups, or RPG mechanics really.
There is a shop where you can buy permanent health upgrades, theres a Arena where you learn new button combo fighting game style moves, and you can buy 3 different styles of magic, but thats it, so since theres no point to really explore, the main draw is the combat or the story (the story is very forgettable and medicore)
Learning new moves at the arena wasn't that interesting or big of a deal, I mostly ignored it for a lot of the game because I felt my moves were already good enough and it was just more pointless padding that tries to make the game seem more deep than it really is.
The combat is sort of Assassin's Creed / Batman arkham style button masher. With tons of quick time events.
The controls are OK, for the most part.
There is no targeting system, instead, your character just sort of locks in on whoever he thinks hes looking at, which can be incredibly frustrating when you're surrounded by 10 mobs and you want to hit one in particular, but the damn player keeps attacking the wrong one.
But besides that, it's sort of fun.
Mostly because there is a satisfying gore system, where you hack off limbs and heads go flying with big mists of blood sprays and twirls and meaty sound effects.
It's the standard X for heavy attack, A for fast attack kind of combat, but then you can hold Left bumper where it activates additional button combos and moves you can do, where you sort of get 'ammo' and different moves cost different amounts of 'ammo' indicated by the icons on the top left of the screen.
Generally, I found myself either holding LB the entire time and spamming buttons so the player keeps doing random combos, which confuse and overwhelmn the enemy AI, or choosing the strongest single button combo I had, usually double or tripple X button, doing 3 fast attacks to gain 'ammo', then pressing LB+XXX to do the strong attack, which breaks shields usually. And thats the whole combat cycle.
There is a few different enemies, but they all kind of look the same grey looking grunt demon thing.
Some of them have shields which can be broken by using certain button combos, other ones have a sword that are super annoying because you cant break their shield and they keep blocking with their sword, and theres another assassin type enemy that jumps on you and makes you wiggle your stick like to shake him off. Sometimes you get a few bigger type enemies, where you have to utilize the awkward dodge mechanic by pressing Left trigger + Y, attack them a bunch, then wait for the Quick Time event prompt to kill them, But really the variety is pretty run of the mill.
The only other enemy is these Giant Trolls, where the first time you see it , you think its an exclusive boss fight. But you quickly realize its just a lame Quick time event enemy that while looks visually impressive, is a push over and time waster that they just keep throwing in and repeating to make the battles feel more artifically epic.
And yes, these trolls are frequently repeated on the 'big battle' ending of each island.
So, more about these 'big ending battles' of each island.
After you complete all the objectives , then you can open your map to go to the main final fortress of each island. Then it teleports you to this big epic battlefield, where your dragons are flying around, and it tells you to "Kill all the shamans" usually.
There are more of either the Quick-time event Troll enemy types you can kill, or the bigger enemy types where you dodge them a few times and wait for the quicktime, if you choose to kill these type of enemies, you get 'Dragon runes' where you can press Select to open up a screen where you can choose a few select spots to tell a dragon to go and do an airstrike.
This usually just helps to speed up the battles because instead of having to awkwardly run through 500 enemies and try to kill the shaman (main objective) yourself, you can call in an airstrike on it.
Because trying to walk up and kill the shaman yourself can sometimes be really stupid and frustrating, mostly by how clumsy the lack of targeting system is.
Because you have to attack these glowing swords on the ground to kill the shaman, but if you are surrounded by enemies, its very difficult to actually get your character to attack the swords instead of the enemies.
And literally thats all it is usually. You kill the 2 shamans, you get a cutscene that goes deeper into the fortress, then bam, 'Kill three more shamans!" repeat this process 2-4 times and then it teleports you to the Next Island, where you cant return to the previous, and do it all over again but in a different terrain.
Island one and two are pretty similar green grassy mountain areas, then island 3 is the snow area. Pretty generic level design, nothing really memorable or stands out, theres a few generic caves you have to go into, no location really stands out except towards the end some giant furnace place.
A few times when trying to progress through the game I found myself lost without direction, it would tell me to go to some place, but it would look impossible to get to by looking at the map.
This happened at one of the final caves 'bring the herbs here to burn them' and it happened again in a few other places. It could have done a better job either explaining how to get to certain locations, or making the map less confusing to look at.
So TL:DR is the game any good?
Pro's
- Can have some good atmosphere and graphics at times can be cool like some areas surrounded by big water waves and viking ships and such
- Combat can be a mindless enjoyable button masher with gore flying all over the place
- Game isn't very confusing or hard, its decent to play and just turn your brain off and mash buttons and kill monsters
- It's pretty short, 3 or 4 sessions, 10 hours long
- Some funny corny campy viking story with Freya and Hel but nothing to really write about, just typical unimaginative deritive stuff. But some of the cutscenes are funny.
- Graphics can be impressive, like some of the big enemy designs like the Trolls, too bad its mostly bullshit quicktime event stuff.
- Sort of open world you can just walk around and do the game however you want, but this might actually be a con because maybe a more linear streamlined experience would be better
- Lots of AI on screen feels like a cool epic battle
Cons
- Game length does feel padded by characters movement speed being sluggish and walking back and forth over and over doing stupid fetch quests talking to NPC's for no real reason.
- Is pretty shallow, no real depth, no reason to explore or care about anything, the magic system felt pointless and I barely used it, its just a dumb button masher, the 'learning new moves at the arena' feature doesn't really matter just felt like they had to add more shit to the game to make it seem less dumb, but its a facade
- Rough around the edges, not to mention the PC port is pretty crap and only supports 30fps, but i didnt care
- Extremely repetivie, if you've played it for 4 hours youve basically seen the entire game, really. Even the last boss is just a recycled Troll that you've killed 20 times by now.
- Combat can be clunky and frustrating, no lockon
- Stealth system is wacky
- Tons of bullshit boring quicktime events
6/10
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