Vikings – Wolves of Midgard is an Action RPG developed by Games Farm who have worked on Air Conflicts and Heretic Kingdoms. Following the journey of a new chieftain of a village wracked by the approaching winter cold and the ever present threat of wildlife and Giant Jotuns. Starting off as a mere peasant, you will raise to Chieftain within minutes, sacrificing blood to the gods to further increase your power and favour with them. Push back the cold, secure supplies and make your clan great!
Story
The game starts off with a short but sweet intro, telling use a little lore of the world and some names to remember. Heavily influenced by Norse Mythology you will come accustomed to talks of Niflheim, Midgard, Gods, Hel, Giants and the like. Your clan, Ulfung, starts off under attack by Tomte, goblin like creatures, as well as Jotun, Giants with a power punch. Quickly dispatching the forces you rebuild your town off-screen, given Chieftain Powers and set off to secure supplies for the village.
Repairing the village comes with the story, upgrades come with your resources, as you complete missions you will unlock new utilities of the village along with upgrading them to improve your gear for future missions/raids. The main aim of the game is to become great within the world and survive its harsh climate.
Featuring a New Game+ mode as well as online multiplayer, there is a bit of replayability to be had, though the game plays very similarly to other Diablo style games like Torchlight. Either you like the game enough to give it another run, or want to test harder difficulties. The game also features a perma-death mode, for those wanting that extra challenge.
Gameplay
Vikings is a very Diablo-esque game, differing itself somewhat from recent games focused on Vikings and Norse mythology. You move your character by clicking on a space on the map or holding it in a direction, WASD are for directional rolls or you can press space bar to roll in the direction you are moving. Holding down the right click will make your character attack with their equipped weapon, along with aiming it if it’s a bow. The melee combat is pretty solid, if simple, however ranged combat can feel quite inaccurate and slow to start.
The game is split up into missions, or raids as the game calls them, a map that has several enemies, destructible objects, chests and objectives. Each of these maps show a good sign of difference from one another, either in its encounters, design or layout, however the game does love to reuse the same maps for future missions and can become stale quite quickly. The maps themselves do feel a bit on the big side, bordering on too big to traverse, becoming slightly monotonous if you want to complete all the side objectives.
As you kill enemies and complete missions you will gain Blood, Gold and materials. Blood is your experience in the game, sacrificing it at altars to gain levels, which give you a point to spend on several areas, from attack damage or speed to health, as well as Gift points to spend further in the gift tree. Gifts are your abilities to use in battle, passive buffs and contextual ones. Gold and Materials will be gathered through opening chests and completing missions, spent to upgrade your village buildings or to craft new arms and armour.
The difficulties in Vikings have big strides between them, from easy allowing you to one-shot most enemies with quick succession to hard making most enemies require 3+ attacks with slower speed. Normal is a good middle ground as it should be, however as you level up it will become quite easy with the plethora of skills and items at hand. Dodging isn’t as effect as you would think, not giving many if any invincibility frames and feeling too short at times.
Overall thoughts and feelings
Vikings has a great soundtrack, from sombre and quiet tracks for the village travel and action packed tunes for battle and bosses. Sadly the music does have some problems with looping or pacing, as plenty of my game time was left in silence, with only the gorgeous ambient noises to fill it. Along with some poor pacing of the tracks, the sound effects are a mish mash of cartoonish and realistic, breaking the immersion incredibly and just sound rushed.
This game feels like it has quite a bit of potential, but effort was spent in the wrong areas for too long. It feels like a rehash of Torchlight in many aspects, combat is clunky as well as the story being rather uninteresting. It is fun for a long time, mowing through enemies or having them teach you manners in a somewhat fair difficulty curve.
Vikings – Wolves of Midgard gets a 6/10, its beginning is both great and long-winded, with some horrible main protagonist voice acting but great secondary voice acting. The theme is too common nowadays, bordering on the overuse of Zombies a few years ago with a Viking game in almost every genre getting released in the past 2 years. Vikings doesn’t bring anything new to the table, it just coats the genre with some dull paint. Thankfully the foundations to the game are strong, but at a full price you might feel ripped off. Fans of Diablo style games should enjoy Vikings, but should not expect that quality of game.
Site Editors thoughts- Since I also got a code, it’s only fair I throw in my thoughts, in short, the game is ok, the environmental elements are unique and add an element you need to be wary of during your battles. The levelling system is easy to learn and understand, and you are able to choose two desired skills sets for your character. Upgrading the town is done through resources collected through your playtime as well as Blood that is given at the alter to level your character up.
As a Fan of Top Down RPG Hack ‘n’ Slash Games I enjoyed myself in the game, even though I do see areas that can be improved upon via patches and DLC, which I hope will come in time.
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