Diamondhunt: Viking: Battle for Asgard

By Ginger_Avenger July 20, 2009 11 Comments

You know, this game

Hey everyone, as someone who enjoys games that take a less steep chunk out of my wallet (Hunting for diamonds in the rough if you will, corny I know) So I thought I might as well share my thoughts on what I find.

In Viking you play as Skarin (which is constantly shown by the fact that almost every single character repeats the name in every sentence) who is mortally wounded while defending his home territory of Asgard against the goddess Hel's Legion. Skarin is saved by the goddess Freya who then tasks Skarin with setting free his fellow vikings and clearing the lands of all Legion. That is basically all the story has to offer here, with it boiling down to you being Freya's bitch who fights against Freya's old bitch who is now Hel's bitch. The reasoning for Hel's invasion is non existant leaving the whole conflict feeling like little more than a sister's squabble. The presentation also leaves much to be desired as it is told in very sporadic, cheap looking comic book style cutscenes that end up adding very little to the whole story.

Really though, Viking is all about chopping up some dudes, and this draw is pretty entertaining for about thirty minutes to an hour, at which point you have seen most of the "fatalities" the game has to offer of which there are only three or four. Seeing these over and over again quickly becomes an exercise of the most tedious quality. That can be said for a lot of Viking which is a real shame. Since the fighting system itself is not bad, although it does not ever evolve to more than mashing the A button and occasionally blocking. You can learn new moves as the game progesses but these mostly feel rather useless and will mostly be ignored during a playthrough.

Repetition is a big detracting factor in the game as well, the main thing you will be doing in the game is taking very long long slow walks to Legion camps, mashing the A button repeatedly and then mashing the B button to open a gate and freeing your fellow vikings. Now there are three islands in the game, and a whole lotta camps spread through out each island. That is a lot of running to each camp and a lot of pressing of the A button.

Also included in this game is some very clunky platforming and a couple mandatory truly awful stealth sections. These are a weird beast as they are a huge raise in difficulty and are just poor in design overall. If you are seen you are soon swarmed and killed, yet there is no clear sense of direction during this on where exactly you are supposed to go.

Overall, Viking: Battle for Asgard is impossible to recommend even at it's low price point. It ends up feeling boring very early and then crams on unwanted game types that are poorly done and no fun at all. This one falls way short of diamond, and is all rough.

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