Viking: Battle for Asgard

March 24, 2008 - No
game is perfect. Some have iffy controls, others have lame stories, and
a few just have weak enemies, but even with these natural foibles,
glitches and hang-ups, a videogame can transcend its limitations and be
heralded as a title where the sum is greater than the parts.

That isn't the case with Viking: Battle for Asgard.

Set in the time when the Norse Gods ruled and people hid gold in
glowing urns for some inexplicable reason, Viking, the latest from SEGA
and Creative Assembly, tosses you into the massive boots of Skarin, a
shirtless warrior who packs a sword and battleaxe. The game opens with
Skarin mortally wounded and about to take a one-way trip to Valhalla,
but Freya -- Odin's daughter -- steps in to save the
Schwarzenegger-like brute as long as he pledges allegiance to her and
promises to go after Hel, queen of the Underworld. Skarin agrees, gets
this glowing amulet from Freya, and we're off!



Now, taking on the queen of the damned isn't a one-man gig. The problem
is, Hel's Legion -- an army of blue-skinned, undead bad guys -- is
roaming the countryside and has imprisoned the very Vikings who would
be willing to fight alongside Skarin. This means that the majority of
your time in Viking is spent scouring the mountain tops and grassy
plains looking for men who are usually locked in giant ribcage prisons
or tethered to skull poles. Find the camps, kill the Legion, and free
the men. From there, the troops usually give you some task to complete
such as gathering healing honey or eliminating a traitor, and once the
odd job is complete, they join your team.

See, you're freeing all of these soldiers for the massive battles that
Viking revolves around. When you tap Back and bring up your map, you'll
find it covered with various icons indicating enemy encampments,
friendly bases and more. Of the enemy kind, you'll see some that have
conditions -- free X number of troops, find the battle horn, etc. --
that must be met before you can complete the task. Usually, these are
the massive battles that act as a middle and end to the level.

Once you meet the battle conditions, you can select the icon on the map
and jump straight into the war. Here's where all of the troops you've
saved march into battle with you. If you haven't seen these skirmishes
in action, they can be pretty impressive. Each one starts with a
cutscene depicting a sea of your men marching toward a horde of
enemies. Dragons fly overhead, Shaman are casting ominous spells in the
distance, and giants wait at the ready. When the scene ends, you're
thrust into the battle the imagery just set up. You and hundreds of
your men move towards hundreds of enemies.

Although there's no way to control what your men are doing, they're
generally pretty good about following you and helping the best they can
-- that is by beating the living hell out of all the blue-skinned
freaks that get in their way. While your boys on the ground tend to the
Legion horde, you're pretty much on your own as far as ending the
battle. Each scenario has win conditions such as eliminating two of the
three Shamans or taking care of a few giants. Once you've completed the
tasks, your troops can move deeper into the base, you'll get a new set
of objectives, and the beat goes on. In the end, you have to call your
Shaman to the base's heart and have her switch it to good.


But he had a family!

And just like that, I've explained Viking. Crisscrossing the map as you
free troops and take on the occasional task that ends with you freeing
troops is what this game is all about. The troop gathering and massive
battles take place on three maps that feature towering mountains for
you to figure out how to climb, flowing streams and plenty of red hot
lava. When you enter bad guy turf, the sky will darken and rain will
fall, and once you've liberated the space from evil's grasp, the sun
pops out and the birds begin to sing.

If it sounds like a shallow experience …well, it kind of is a shallow
experience, but hat doesn't mean it's not fun. On the surface, fighting
camp after camp of evil monsters sounds a repetitive bore -- and it is
toward the end -- but Viking actually did do a good job of keeping me
entertained. Aside from the different ranks of beast each map dot holds
-- there are archers, swordsmen, wooden shields, steel shields,
double-sword wielders, and more -- there's the constant question of how
to infiltrate their ranks. In the beginning, it's easy (just run in
there and hack away with the weak strike button before letting off a
heavy attack), but by the third island, I found myself standing back
and scoping out all of the different entry points and options.

One base had my men and the aforementioned ribcage structure in the
middle of the encampment. After a while of watching troop patterns and
locations, I crept up on the base -- Skarin drops to a tip-toe crouch
when he can see enemies but they haven't seen him -- and took out the
one guard at the southeast entrance. After that, I waited for a patrol
to pass, ran into the camp, freed my men, and let them help me with the
murder of every creature in the place.

Now, if there were just a few of the low-level Legion in there, I
probably would've run in and just waxed them all without worrying. If
there were some monsters off in the distance, I would've had to have
been careful that a horn blower wasn't hanging near the prisoners -- if
he sees me before I get the chance to kill him, he can alert every
enemy nearby to come kick my ass. These little touches of stealth,
problem solving and planning are nice additions that actually keep the
hack-and-slash gameplay from getting too stale … at least for a while.

Want to know what else helps? Insane levels of violence. We're talking
Rob Zombie levels here. Remember how I said I iced that lonely guard a
few paragraphs back? That was a lot cooler than I initially let on. As
you run around Midgard and gather gold, you can take it and buy new
moves from this Viking ghost. One of those moves allows for instant
kills if you sneak up on a foe. You'll be creeping up, X will appear
above his head, you'll tap the button, and Skarin will cut the bastard
in half with one strike.

Blood will gush everywhere and entrails will be visible.

These bloody, grotesque deaths aren't limited to stealth kills. Once
you've whittled away the life -- and usually an arm -- of an opponent,
X will pop up over the bad guy. Tap it and Skarin will launch into a
slow-motion dismembering attack that will spray red goo everywhere.
He'll lop off their heads, cut them in half remove their limbs, and
more.

It's awesome, and the finishers usually give off more magic-meter filling red orbs than the normal kill would've.



Sadly though, fun tidbits get lost in a sea of mediocrity when it comes
to Viking. To begin with, the game can get extremely frustrating -- and
I'm talking beyond the fact that you're just alternating between two
attack buttons for the entire thing. There's a mission early on in your
quest when you have to sneak into an enemy's base and power a sacred
stone at their portal. The way the task is set up, you have to crawl
into the camp and walk around the entire perimeter to get from Point A
to Point B. If you're spotted, there are way too many people to fight
and survive so you must run. However, there's no run button, so Skarin
just jogs at his normal pace while enemies leap and stab him in the
back, which completely halts your getaway. When you get to the energy
your stone needs, you have to tap the B button to power up, however the
bad guys who were chasing you are now on top of you and each time one
of their blows connects, you stop powering up the stone.

Grr.

Of course, if I thought that was bad, the assault on Hel's fortress
showed that I hadn't seen anything yet. With the final big battle
behind me, I was now sent out on my own to best the queen once and for
all. However, first I had to climb a seemingly never-ending staircase
that was filled with enemies. Did I mention that Viking's combat is
incredibly hit-or-miss when combatants are going at it on different
levels?

Argh.

Once I wasted all of my health potions and throwing axes on the
villains who insisted on blocking everything, I climbed into the final
battle with Hel. Now, for the few of you who don't become incredibly
bored with Viking and actually make it to the end, I won't ruin the
final boss fight for you, but I will tell you that not only is it
absurd and anti-climatic, it is also one of the most annoying fights
I've had in quite sometime. When you're waiting and waiting and waiting
to move to the next area, you'll see what I mean.

The story of Skarin seems like it could've been an interesting one, but
you'll never get it from Viking. The game opens with some colorful
artwork and an over-the-top voiceover that works, but the story is
quickly forgotten. Skarin never really speaks and just turns into
Freya's errand boy. Toward the end, there's some info announced about
Skarin's past, but he doesn't even react to the news and we have no
idea why this would matter or who the players are. In fact, the only
person I ever felt like I knew a lot about was Drakan, Hel's harbinger.
We get a nifty little bit of VO and artwork exploring his love for
Freya and his turn to the dark side, which made me feel for the
character. It's a shame that care was never given to any of the
characters that mattered.


For Midgard!

Another
huge drawback of the game is sound. Your entire time in Viking is spent
traversing this open world, but the place seems dead. Ambient noise
seems limited to Skarin's footsteps and the pitter-patter of raindrops,
but even those can only be heard when the volume is cranked up on your
TV. There were times when Skarin would cut someone down and there'd be
no noise, times when a cutscene would play and in-game action would
return with no sound, and when you release a group of troops, they give
off a pitiful cry of celebration. There's no option to raise or lower
the individual volume levels for music and special effects; there's
just one "volume" setting that governs both poorly.

Still, the biggest drawback to Viking has to be the slow down when it
comes to massive battles. Way back when we saw this game in Germany,
the creators pitched Viking as being all about those massive battles I
spent a few paragraphs talking about a while ago. Sadly, when you get
to those parts in the game, the framerate drops and the action chugs
along. It's not unplayable, just extremely disappointing. By the time
you get to these wars -- my game was fine until I got to the first big
battle of the second map -- you'll be quite familiar with how Skarin
and company are supposed to move and act. So, when you are treated to a
cutscene setting up the huge attack and are then greeted by Skarin
slowly running into the fray as everything around him acts slower as
well, you'll be pretty letdown.



When it comes to graphics, Viking continues its standard of being a
mixed bag. At times, the game looks great, bright and crisp as Skarin
slices enemies into lunch bag-sized pieces or runs through the grassy
environments collecting gold, which he can exchange for health bar
upgrades or fire bombs, and when Skarin's exploring the pitch black
caves and his amulet gives off an eerie lantern glow that lights the
area surrounding him. Then, there are the times when grass textures
pop-in as the camera pans, when the dragons you command show up and
look like cardboard, and when you realize the game's using the same
handful of NPCs for your men over and over.

For the fanboys out there, comparing the Xbox 360 version of Viking to the PlayStation 3 version
will only fuel the ever-raging fire. The technical problem of slow down
is still there -- and actually a bit worse -- on the PS3, but Sony's
machine also runs into some problems in terms of graphics. The light
from Skarin's amulet doesn't reflect the same way on PS3 and makes the
character look weird, colors are washed out, and some effects such as
the ripple on the screen when you visit the Viking ghost are completely
cut out.

Closing Comments
Short and
sweet: Viking could've been great. The massive battles are a neat idea,
the world can seem huge, and while simplistic, the hack-and-slash
gameplay is fun for a while. Sadly, the problems in the game make sure
that none of those good things can standout too proudly. The battles
stumble thanks to chug, the worlds get repetitive, and when you're not
really interested in the story or your ultimate goal, hack-and-slash
gets on your nerves no matter how many times you cut a guy in two.
There's still content here to like and enjoy, but I'd suggest sifting through it on the weekend as a rental.
IGN Ratings for Viking: Battle for Asgard (X360)



RatingDescription

out of 10
5.5	Presentation The colored cutscenes look nice, but the story is never really explored. Navigating the map can be tricky because you can't pick out elevations all that well.
7.0	Graphics Viking does have moments -- such as the first time Skarin cuts a dude in half or when he's exploring a cave -- where it looks really good, but they're mixed with lame dragons and repeating NPCs.
4.5	Sound Even when the sound is cranked, there's nothing to hear. The islands seem dead.
6.5	Gameplay It's simplistic but fun to run all over the place killing bad guys and pulling off errands, but eventually that luster wears thin when you've attacked an untold number of enemy camps.
6.5	Lasting Appeal The game's close to the 10-hour neighborhood, but there's no replay value to it since you complete all the tasks your first time through.
6.5 Passable	OVERALL (out of 10 / not an average)