Viking

Having spent the last week or so while barely indulging in the luxury of sitting down for more than 10 minutes, you should consider yourself damned lucky I'm posting anything at all, with or without pictures. Also, I hate moving.



With my comfortable excuse out of the way, let's get cracking with this week's review: Viking. If memory serves, this is another game with the misfortune to be launched alongside Condemned 2, which as Blacksite proved, isn't a good thing. The problem is that Viking is a game I had no prior knowledge about, to the point where I accused someone of living with mittens sewn to their jacket when they asked me if it was out or not yet.



First impressions weren't all that good, with a long-haired, overly muscular bloke, posing in an overly-muscular way, showing off his long hair and dodgy ponytail. In the snow. Ignoring the gay references and the niggling feeling that Asgard is somewhere in the Lord of the Rings universe, I selflessly ploughed into Viking-full-title: Battle for Asgard to bring you, my loyal reader(s) more of my critical cynicism and almost pathetic nit-picking.



At least, that was the plan. First time I got a moment alone with my 360, I put Viking in the tray (that's disc tray, not dinner tray), watched the first cutscene understanding something along the lines of "I'm the long-haired, overly muscular prick standing around in the snow, only now I'm the long-haired muscular prick standing in a field being stabbed. And now someone else will keep reviving me as long as I..." yada yada yada, something to do with freeing men with beards. Then having watched the first cutscene and talked to a bearded man and a slightly less bearded woman, I was greeted with a crash. Then another. And another. Then, lo and behold, I became intimately familiar with the renowned "ring of death", or as I prefer to call it, the "you're fucked now lights".



Call me childish, but I guess the best start with a new game generally isn't categorised by trying to play it on what you understand to be an upgrade of some truly knackered hardware (if you can't keep up, I mean it was a 360 Elite that died on me), only to have said upgraded hardware cough a bit, then decided to lie down and never move again. Metaphorically, of course. Anyway, I ignored this cock-up on Microsoft's part and gave Viking another try.



I was rather pleased to discover that it plays quite a lot like Fable - and this is a good thing, because it's the only RPG I can think of that could spur me on to finish once, let alone 11 times, each time happier than a fat kid locked in a bakery. The bonus being that someone decided Skarin (which I'm also pretty certain was a bad guy in Enterprise) could jump and climb over stuff, as well as being the most muscular wuss in the world by being completely unable to swim despite being quite free to walk straight into the sea. Is it just me or would you be quite capable of swimming if you spent your entire life living in a village separated from the seaside by a few twigs?



So far I have two niggles then: the originality has been skimped on and the main character has about as much swimming talent as a paraplegic squirrel. This is generally the point in my review where I'd start balancing out my argument with stuff that I like, but in the interest of consistency, I'm going to continue giving Viking the going over with the good old chainsaw of rape and criticism. Something I noticed very quickly, once I'd used blind luck to find my way out of the village and how to kill people, was that every single viking warrior outside the village seemed to be born from the exact same sperm and egg combination. Remarkable, really, until you realise that this isn't reality, so the odds of that happening in reality was completely irrelevant and Sega are just a bunch of lazy arses.



I briefly mentioned how I had to figure out how to kill things on my own, so it's time for me to elaborate on that. When you start the game, the entire tutorial is how to move the camera and pressing B when you come near some people will start them talking. So, after a few hours I figured out a use for gold, i.e., realistic health potions that heal you in the same way that you can have an interesting conversation with a dog, and buying new ways to kill people. That was about it, I accidentally figured out how to start an "assault" while dicking around with the map and spent the rest of the time killing people.



...which neatly brings me to the positives. Someone, at some point in development decided that giving enemies health meters or hit points was a crap idea, and instead you kill enemies by cutting them into small pieces. And when you decide to make a game where you kill people by literally bringing them out of themselves, then apart from themselves and finally pulling them back together in a sort of gruesome pile of blood and organs on the floor, you generally can't do much to make it anything other than fun to play in my opinion.



Unless of course you decided to swarm the player with a combination of enemies and allies in an epic clash best described by getting two glasses of dry sand and pouring them in a bowl. And of course, because the universe is out to get me, this is exactly the case, but with a good old catch-22 thrown in for good measure. Yeah, I admit I didn't finish Viking, but that was because it wanted me to assault an encampment once I'd freed a lot of Vikings and summoned a dragon, but the only way to summon the dragon was to collect a rock from somewhere then plug into the mains socket inside the encampment I couldn't fight my way into until I'd summoned the dragon. Which is a shame, because I would have loved to see a big dragon involved in a game where it's almost too easy to separate a man from his legs. Well that's not strictly true, I don't think it's a bad thing when it's easy to separate a man from his legs.



Where does that leave my viewpoint then? Well, to sum up I'd say that the viking part of Viking is done really well: you attack with a pair of very pointy weapons which do damage like very pointy weapons, but pretty much everything else in the entire game is... somewhere. Who knows, maybe with more tutorials it would have stood up more favourably. But then again, maybe 4x4s would go down better with Greenpeace if they were powered by nuclear reactors rather than oil and maybe life would be better if everyone walked around with their wallets stapled to their foreheads.



Should you have anything you want to say to me, and you're too scared of leaving a comment then I'm going to take a gamble by leaving my email address for you all:

phill_j@hotmail.co.uk