Viking: Battle for Asgard

[DroopyA]

3rd person hack and slash. No multiplayer, no online. 7 out of 10... good mindless fun. I suggest listening to the new Dimmi albul the entire time you play it. If you do... 8 out of 10.

You're a viking named Skarin that dies on the battlefield only to be revived by the goddess Freya in order to lead the mortal army of man against the evil goddess Hel and her force of undead champions.

The game takes place on 3 diffrent islands. Each island is representational of a 'level' so although each island can be explored freely, it is not possible to travel between islands. You can't get to island 2 until you finish island 1. And once you reach island 2, there's no going back to island 1 ever again.

The idea of the game is simple... build an army, seige the local castle. To seige the local castle you'll have to acomplish a series of goals (found by highlighting the castle on the world map). This usually requires building an army large enough to attack (liberate x camps), summon a dragon (find the two peices of the summoning stone), and some 3rd objective that is esentually the same thing as the first objective but worded diffrently (Take control of the lumber mill to build seige weapons).

Note: You can't use seige weapons... they're only used in cut scenes. So objective 3 is "liberate lumber mill" which could have techincally been placed in with objective one.

So a typical section plays as:
You find a camp. The camp is full of bad guys and in the camp is a cage filled with friendly warriors. Kill your way to the cage gate. Open the gate. You and your men kill everybody left in the village. Your men run away and you get a message telling you that new warriors have joined your army.

Sometimes you'll free a group of men and they still won't join your army. At this point, you usually have to talk to the leader who will tell you that you need to earn his respect... and to do that, you have to go kill more people.

Basically, regardless of how it's worded, the idea of the game is to hack and slash every enemy you come in contact with.

Ocassonally you'll have to go to an area where there are too many enemies to kill by yourself. That's not to say that you can't try... but it's pretty hard. In areas like these, it's best to just sneak around and kill only who you have too. This is easier if you buy the sneak killing moves... which, when hidden, can allow you to silently kill an enemy in one strike.

There are a few bosses... Giants and Champions pretty much play the same. They're big guys that require a lot of hits to drag down. The final blow can only be dealt through a series of button timing events. The only exception are the summoners... these guys constantly summon new bad guys to the field and will continue to do so until killed. They protect themself with a number of totem polls that must be destroyed first. After the totems are destroyed, the summoner can be killed with a single hit of your choosing.

This is really where the game flaws start showing. Combos are hard to control and the character likes to switch targets a lot. There's not target locking so its sometimes a challenge to keep the character focused on specific enemies or items that may be more important kills on the battlefield.

For example, totems usually take 3 to 5 hits... but after two hits Skarin would switch focus to another target who has recently become a threat. Although this makes combat enjoyable about 90% of the time, it causes unnecessary frustration and death the other 10% of the time. Like in this situation... it would be better to kill the totems then it is to waist strikes on enemies that are just going to be respawned seconds after death. You eventually get the hang of it, but it's really something that shouldn't ever be an issue.

That's pretty much it... I personally loved it. The graphics where sweet, the water effects where the best I've ever seen, and reardless of how complex games get, it's always fun to just button mash your way to victory from time to time.

Also, it comes loaded with lots of easy achivements. One solid play through on 'hard' is all you need for all 1000 points.

I'd like to see a sequal...