Viking: Battle for Asgard

As you may be aware I am registered to a site called True Achievements which compares Xbox360 Achievements earned versus those earned by others and generally uses this as a measurement to assess how easy some achievements are to earn.

They also have a section called ‘Easy Achievements’ which looks at games you’ve played with achievements that are ‘Easy’ to earn. This was a bit of a kick in the head as when I chose to look at this, it told me that there were loads of achievements for this game which were ‘easy.’ I had only earned three of these and took it bit personally that the rest of the game was rated as easy, so I went on a 1,000 point mission and was quite successful (hence, the review).

I can’t remember why I stopped playing the game three achievements in, but it did become apparent after about twenty minutes of game time, but more on that later.

The story line of Viking is a basic one. You are the Viking, Skarin and you are working for your God, Freya, and she has tasked you with ridding the world of Hel’s demon Legion forces as they have been trying to destroy all the Vikings on three small islands in the Viking Empire. However, these demonic legions don’t kill the Vikings. Instead they tie them to poles or keep them in cages for no explained reason, especially if they are hell bent on destroying all the Vikings.

The God rivalry between Hel and Freya gets quite bizarre during the last few sections of the game. Freya appears to go a little bit insane with power, to the point where I was anticipating a plot twist and be asked to destroy Freya instead. This never came despite being really hinted at. I could almost imagine Freya, red eyed and frothing at the mouth as she’s telling me to destroy Hel for her. This kind of one-way storyline is very in keeping with the rest of the game.

The whole game feels very flat in every aspect. There is no real variance between the different islands and you have to complete the same tasks over and over again. It goes like this:

Step 1: Go to location A

Step 2: Kill enemies at location A

Step 3: Free the Vikings at location A

Step 4: Complete obligatory quest for Viking A, which means going to location B to kill generic enemy A before the Vikings you’ve freed will join your army.

Step 5: Repeat steps 1 through 4 moving the letters on to B and C respectively.

The game only deviates from this when you have to do the big battles once you convinced all available Vikings to join your army. I have two major contentions with this.

Contention number 1: If the evil Hel’s legion had done what they were supposed to have done, there wouldn’t be any Vikings to save as they would all be dead.

Contention number 2: After saving the ‘already should be dead’ Vikings from their deaths, why do I then have to complete another assignment to prove myself to them before they will join forces with me to destroy the evil forces that captured they in the first place!?

To sum up, the game play is very repetitive and the premise for the whole thing is weak and that is being kind.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Earlier I mentioned that I started playing but stopped after earning three achievements and the reason for this was that I couldn’t be bothered to play the game twice so dived straight into it on hard mode. There are three achievements for completing the game on hard and all of the fifty achievements can be obtained on one playthrough.

Hard mode isn’t that different to normal mode but after clearing location C of demons (see the above description) I must have become bored or moved on to a high profile release. Either way the main difficulty with obtaining these is that you will become very bored with having to do the same thing over and over again.

Also there is no real punishment for dying, other than having to return to the home village to then fast travel back to closest fast travel point to your point of death. The sheer mindnumbingness of the task in front of me caused me to die over and over again in some places.

There are also a few missable achievements for collecting some skulls which I was aware of, but then completely forgot about. This meant I had to replay the first island to get one of the ones I missed. I hold my hands up to this – completely my own fault.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It is an easy game to add to the ‘completed’ collection but it was not fun. I think enjoyed about half an hour of the game but once I’d figured out the gameplay pattern it became so repetitive it made me want to kill myself. The achievements didn’t push me outside of the main game constraints enough to give me a sense of actual achievement from completing it and I wouldn’t recommend this to friends or Vikings. Not that I know any.