Viking: Wolves of Midgard is another under the radar Diablo inspired Action RPG. As usual for these kinds of games I'm not overly interested in playing through it just by myself, but they usually offer co-op campaign playthroughs so thats the main draw. I'm a big fan of the genre and gameplay style so as long as it offers co-op then it should be a decent time.
Viking starts off asking you to make a character. You can do small customizations like hair type and tattoos, then it asks you what kind of weapon style/archetype you want to focus on. One hand with shield, Two hand big weapons, Ranged etc. These are like picking your primary skill tree. As usual I like to do just the generic warrior archetype with big axes and two hand swords so I chose that one.
It then asks you what difficulty you want to choose. We briefly googled around for advice on this, and saw some people say that even on the hardest the game is still barely challenging. So we chose the Very Hard difficulty.
The game starts off much like any other in the genre, you go around these snowy tundras fighting wolves and bears and other type beasts until eventually coming across a village. Here in the town you can interact with multiple different merchants, and you can even upgrade them using resources such as Wood, Iron, Gold, etc, so they offer stronger items. Sadly the co-op isn't implemented very good or fully fleshed out because only the Host gets to experience all the upgrading of various town assets while the co-op partner sits there unable to look at any of it. Also, this is one of those kind of ARPGs that feature only one main village. I kind of like when these games only have one central town, though, it makes you have a very concrete foundation of a gameplay loop to come back to this safe town throughout the whole game in between killing monsters.
Surprisingly, this is not an open world game. What I mean is usually in other kinds of ARPGs like Diablo, Titan Quest, or even Van Helsing you can leave the villages and go explore these big open fields and maps, but in Viking:Battle For Midgard it uses a more linear, mission based level structure. When you leave the town, the Host can choose to either warp to various repeatable Side missions, or warp away to the next predetermined main mission Level. It is kind of refreshing to have a game like this not rely on just randomly roaming around open fields and have you warp to designated levels, but the execution here isn't really that exciting, I'll get more to that later. One upside is that it makes the game at least have a decent feel with the pacing, as theres always a designated set beginning and end of each mission so it lets you easily take breaks or know when you can stop for the day. Although it does kind of suck that if you quit mid-mission you lose all progress and have to do the whole thing again.
The game also features a checkpoint system which is pretty uncommon for the genre. Usually in games like this, when you die you can either warp back to the closest waypoint or take for example a Town portal, but in this game there are no town portals but instead you will frequently get checkpoints, that if both of the players die, you lose any experience and items gained and return back to the latest checkpoint. This is pretty odd, because you can find good items or get a lot of experience but then be rolled back. Its not really a system I find approproiate for this style of game, frankly.
Besides the weird checkpoint system, the game also does a lot of things to try to stand out from the crowd. For instance the Right mouse button is a dedicated Roll button. Its like they noticed that Souls games were becoming increasingly popular around this time and tried to incorporate some of these ideas into their game, but to very awkward results. They thought this feature was so important that there are THREE (3) dedicated roll buttons. Right mouse button, WASD, and Spacebar! In reality, all you end up using the roll for 90% of the time is to move faster. Because for some stupid reason, you move a lot faster by just spamming roll. So for the whole game you end up rolling all over the place like a jackass simply because its the most efficient way to move around the game. Actually using the roll in combat feels clunky and pointless most of the time. I suspect there are Invincibility frames (I-frames) sometimes, but its so finnicky and hard to achieve that it mostly feels pointless. Yeah, I sometimes use roll to dodge out of the way of enemy attacks and stuff but maybe its just because im otherwise so bored that I throw it in there just for something to do, I don't know if it actually really helps all that much.
Additionally, more features that try to make the game stand out from others in the genre besides the weird rolling and checkpoint systems, is the Health potion mechanics. Its standard in the genre to either buy potions from merchants, pick them up off enemies and chests, or the more modern systems like Path of Exile where your potions regenerate when you get kills - however Viking has the strangest system of all. You only start off with 2 potion charges, and the only way to refresh / get more potions is to find these Health stations spread around the maps at specific points to where it recharges all your pots. Its bizarre. I understand they want to prevent stuff like spamming tons of health potions to trivialize the game, but this is just such an odd, out of place solution. Its like theyre treating it like its a First Person Shooter game where you have to go around and collect Medkits. So for the first bit of the game we barely ever had health potions and had to play so slowly and carefully it was kind of annoying. Eventually we found out you can buy enhanced potion slot from a merchant, so instead of 2 charges you now get 4 charges that can heal more or less, still it only marginally made the whole system feel different.
There is another system called Talismans. These are an item you can equip that gives you an ability that has a set amount of charges and then the item breaks. So for example you can use it 9 times, with a minute long cooldown in between, to shoot out a giant fireball or something like that. Well, we found out early on that one of these Talisman is a Healing circle. So naturally, since the game is so lacking on health potions, we ended up using these Talismans as sort of a health potion. You can buy them from a merchant in town, so effectively instead of buying health potions like any other ARPG, in this game you buy Healing necklaces that break when you use the charges, only to immediately equip the next one. Its just stupid because it invalidates all the other Talismans in the game. Why bother using some damage one when these healing ones are basically mandatory to be able to actually progress through the game since healing is so stingy?
I guess that brings me more broadly to talk about the rest of the items in the game...well, its not good. At all, really. First of all the UI doesnt properly update after you equip an item. You have to close the inventory and open it back up again to make it properly refresh the comparison window. Shocking, I know. The stats on items are really plain, but I also dont like the way its handled at all. You have stats that say stuff like "Damage 1.04x" "Lifesteal" "Crit chance" "Life" and at first I tried to manually look at all the stats and compare them and try to figure out what to use. But quickly I realized theres an "Armor" and "DPS" stat on the bottom of the inventory, so I eventually just blindly equipped items without even reading the stats until the DPS number or Armor went up. Usually some ARPGs will show you a total dps like this, but you still also have to manually look at the stats, but here in Viking since they are so simplistic you dont even have to, really. I also dont like the equipment slots themselves. You only have 1 ring slot, and your talisman is used for those temporary limited buff abilities I mentioned before (Healing circle one). Then the other slots you have a Health potion slot that you have to upgrade, but you dont even get a slot for your Boots. You have this 'accessory' slot that has all sorts of random shit like these weird effigies, but it also counts (i think) for your belt and boot slot. Its just a mess. Really, all I ended up doing for every single slot was blindly equipping shit until my DPS went up. It was boring. The only things I really cared about was my Chest armor and Weapon. I used a two hand weapon so it was slightly exciting finding upgrades and making my damage go up. As for actually finding and picking up loot, that kinda sucks too. You automatically picking up items just by walking around the world, which is bad because it looses that impact and 'weight' of having to pick stuff up yourself. It makes the items feel less important. There are chests all over the place, but most of the time they are worthless and only drop Wood, Iron, and random scraps. Items dont even drop that frequently overall, so you can go long stretches of time without even picking up anything at all. And something else strange is going on, its almost like much of the items arent random at all and are pre-set. For example, I was playing co-op, and me and my buddy would frequently get the exact same items off the same enemies. For most of the game we would be walking around looking exactly the same, wearing roughly the same stuff. So the game proved to us that it has virtually no item variety.
As for the other RPG stats in the game, its just weird. You dont automatically level up, instead you have to "collect blood" and then find one of these altars scattered around levels or in the main town. Except, you cannot return to main town at any time as there are no Town Portals. So freqeutnly you can have a level up ready but not be able to do it because you're nowhere near an altar. Just why? I dont get the point of this system. Again, the game has all this rolling bullshit, and now you have to collect "blood" to bring it to an altar? Its like they really want to riff off the Dark Souls shit. It just doesnt make sense here, though. Whats the point? It just makes the game more tedious for no reason. Actually leveling up is stupid simple. There are no character stat points like Strength, Vitality, Dex, etc. All you get is a handful of stats like Maximum Life, Attack Speed, Damage, and they only go up by 1% each level up. I just got Damage every single level until it was maxed (20). Then I went on to Maximum Health until the game was over. Very dull. Thats all there is to the items and leveling.
There are a few different skill trees, but they seem to be based around weapon type. Theres on skill tree for Bow, Sword and Shield, Two hand Weapons, etc. I picked the Two Hand Weapons skill tree and theres not really many choices to be made. You can eventually unlock every single thing on the skill tree of your choice. But starting out you just get things like Two hand Damage, a lot of points on the tree work around this Rage mechanic where after so many kills you press a button to go into a Rage, and then you have a handful of skills to put points into. You have skills like Ground smash, Hammer boomerang thing, Cleave, and a Stun ability. This is another bizarre thing. It doesnt seem like you can add or remove skills from the skill bar. When you unlock skills, it automatically puts them on the bar. But there are only 5 slots. Does that mean you can only use 5 skills in the entire game? What about the other trees? Eventually I unlocked all the skills on the Two Hand Tree and I guess that was the end of my choices. Now, the game doesnt have a Mana system or any penalty for just spamming your abilities. It works on a basic cooldown timer. You press a skill, and its on a cooldown for a few seconds. Since there is no mana penalty, what I eventually realized and ended up doing is just spamming 1234 any time I was in combat. Thats the extent of what the combat turned into. Something like World of Warcraft skill rotations. Endlessly spamming 1234 and the occassional 5 for the stun ability. Wow. This made the combat feel pretty stupid and unsatisfying but it seemed to do the most DPS so... It seems like the game kind of does punish you for just spamming abilities, though, because they dont generate Rage. Attacking normally seems to be the only way to generate your rage meter fast. So I did wrestle with that idea for awhile. In the end I decided that even without generating rage as fast, its still way more DPS, so usually its more worth it to just spam. Oh well. More often than not too, the items you pickup on the ground sucks and you can simply go back to town and upgrade the merchants and suddenly they will sell the best shit in the game, further making the excitement of finding items nonexistent.
The game has 26 or so main levels you have to go through, each of them taking anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Theres not all that much variety in these levels. Most of them are just outdoors wintery places, You do have nice changes of pace with these beach/village levels though. the game is fairly linear but not quite as linear as something like Warhammer: Chaosbane. There are mazes and twists and turns and detours but its not like a single hallway the whole time. Another thing this game does to try to stand out from the crowd is that some levels will have Enviornmental effects. These are things like you will slowly freeze to death unless you run around the map and stop at these designated warm areas. Other levels, you will get poisoned unless you run to safe zones. Other levels you will burn from too much heat. Other places, you take this magical Dark damage. This might sound like an interesting mechanic on paper but in practice it doesnt really add any challenge to the game or interesting gameplay choices, all it does is forces you to constantly backtrack and play very tediously. Its one of the largest contributors to making the game suck ass, frankly. You cant just proceed hacking through enemies at a good pace, you have to kill two enemies then run all the way back and twiddle your thumbs for 30 seconds. It sucks. It became a large annoyance especially in the second half of the game where we were just sick of dealing with it. At least there are a good chunk of levels that dont have this stuff, and surprise surprise those ones were more enjoyable.
Besides that the actual level design is fairly straight forward, you usually just look at the map and run towards some objective (By the way, the map is well done, at least). Objectives like pushing levels, solving very simple puzzles (That were not really necessary in a game like this), using some machine to blow up a barrier, or just kill waves of enemies. You have these zones where the level wont progress until two players stand side by side in a circle, which I thought was a strange way to break apart the level sections but it worked. The game has lots of boss fights, pretty much at the end of every level, which was probably one of the highlights of the game. Having to coordinate putting down health totems for eachother and rolling out of boss attacks was probably the most engagement I've had with the game. They usually have some cool designs like huge monsters, I vaguely remember a few of the fights being bullshit with these enviornmental totems you had to destroy first but overall it was okay.
Thankfully (or maybe not) the game doesnt have any level scaling with the monsters, this means that if youre overpowered you can just steamroll through the levels and the monsters wont magically be just as strong as you. However, since we played on hardest difficulty the game wasnt that much of a cakewalk. By the second half of the game, We would beat one main level, then by the next level we would be almost powerless, having to quit to town and go grind one of the side missions. This eventually got to be a really annoying slog, mostly because the variety of side content was just bad. You cant even see the level of monsters before you go into a side mission so you have to load all the way in, just to realize the monsters are 10 levels lower. Also, you cant just go roam around previous levels you beat, you have to pick one of these side missions that have designated tasks for you to do, and they are infinitely replayable so you end up doing the same levels, the same objectives, over and over just to get some XP just to be strong enough to progress the main quest. It started to suck badly. Maybe its our fault for picking too high difficulty, but still the game just had shitty optional content regardless. And it was clear that the difference in just one level up was huge, you'd go from being a weak piece of shit to suddenly steamrolling over the mobs that were annihilating you.
The story and dialogue was just there. Incredibly generic Viking bullshit. I tuned it all out after a certain point, all I need is the vague general notion of what I'm doing, the lore was just not exciting. Some of the voice acting was entertaining in how stupid it sounded, but other than that I couldn't care less.
The game is frequently very buggy. I doubt they even playtested this shit. Like I said before, the UI being glitchy, the game frequently losing connection, levels just straight up breaking and scripts not executing forcing us to redo entire levels, the lazy AI where you can easily exploit them by standing in certain areas, there was even a bug where my DPS number wouldnt properly update unless I equipped my weapon off and on. Like the whole thing was such a fucking mess.
The game ends with this annoying lava level where you easily burn to death from enviormental effects, with few and far between health stations, and lots of backtracking for warmth. Make your way to the last boss, this big demon guy hanging off a cliff side just sitting there looking at you, spawning enemies and dropping cages (?) on your head. All you had to do is stand in the corner of the arena and you barely take damage, wait 30 seconds for his head to come down, then spam damage. Repeat until last cutscene, and the game kicks you to main menu. Wow. It was bad. I didnt even check to see if the game has any sort of 'endgame'. It kicked me to main menu so I instantly quit the game and uninstalled it from steam. I beat it. It was not good. I mean, I can say some nice things briefly: Some of the graphics were okay like the models, although it could easily pass for a 2007 game or something. I like that its an actually melee focused ARPG where you can totally play swinging your big sword at the enemy, believe it or not some ARPGs melee is just the worst choice, I liked how it only had one main village, something about ARPGs with just one central location is comfy to me, I commend it for atleast trying to standout from the crowd, even though it failed in virtually every aspect. At least it was co-op, it would have been even worse solo.
4/10
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