system: xbox 360
one sentence description: mindless hack-and-slash fun and extreme violence with a non-speaking musclebound main character
graphics: 9 | sound: 5 | playability: 6 | challenge: 5 | value: 6 | bias: 8
total: 6.8
the low-down
first, let me say that the lower score absoloutely does not mean that i have not been enjoying the game. on contrary, i’m actually having quite a bit of fun with it despite the fact that it truly is completely mindless and not very well thought out. playing this game makes me think that it has an absolute TON of potential for the future, and i hope that it does well enough for the publishers to do a second game that addresses some of the things i’ve laid out here.
you play the character ’skarin’, a large tattoo’d sword-and-axe wielding mute who runs around hacking undead dudes to shreds. you’re doing this because freya, the norse goddess, has asked you to fight for her against hel’s ‘legion’ (hel, of course, is the ‘bad girl’ goddess) who is taking over asgard.
end of story.
really, any kind of plot that is there is asinine. there’s a story that is told in a very graphic novel-esque way, but it’s completely forgettable. it also appears that you’re being plagued by some kind of other god’s thoughts or having some kind of flashback. again, it’s inconsequential. note my lack of recall on it if that tells you anything about how utterly throw-away the story is.
you start at one point on the map and are tasked with capturing other specific points, like a refinery…or a lumber mill…or a farm. these points, of course, have been taken over by the undead. you capture the points by freeing your viking bretheren from their prison and then killing all of the undead occupying that point. it’s not really all that inredibly challenging and is fairly repetitive from point to point, map to map. you mash out various combo attacks against hordes upon hordes of enemies, see limbs and heads fly, use a special attack or two and throw some axes and fire potions. throw in some epic large battles here and there and then you wash…rinse…repeat. a lot of people have complained about the camera, but i don’t find it any better or worse than a lot of similar games. my only complaint is that sometimes when you’re attacking, it doesn’t allow you to see enough of the screen…so if something gets behind you or to the side, you generally won’t see it until it you’re being hit. oh well…
i mentioned epic battles; they are kind of cool except for the fact that you can, for the most part, avoid the hordes of bad guys in your way and go straight towards your objective(s), which generally involves killing a shaman or a large sword-weilding bad guy. when you accomplish this, they give you ‘dragon amulets’, which you use to summon dragons…kind of like artillery. you have no control of them. they just come flying in an destroy what you tell them.
there are so many little things that could be improved with the game that would have made it a much cooler experience.
the sound is not all that great. you’d expect there to be some kind of intense epic battle music going on…but there isn’t. music plays every once in a while, specifically during the larger scale battles, but not during regular gameplay. or when you free you viking buddies from their cages, you’d figure they’d be pretty exstatic to be free’d. but they generally just come out and go after the nearest bad guys.
the large battles are pretty sedate. there is no fire crackling and large explosions or the sound of arrows whizzing through the air or burly man in armor battle cries. it’s just kind of bleh.
the moves start getting repetitive after a while. cutting to slow-mo and watching your guy hack off arms and heads is cool the first several hundred times, but after seeing the same animation over and over, it’s just boring. it would’ve been cool if they would’ve been more creative on this front.
i wish you had some control over your guys on the battlefield. you don’t use the directional pad for anything…so why couldn’t the developers map a few really simple moves to groups of your men that you target in a battle?
ever since ‘god of war’, there has been this trend of putting in these little stupid twitch button mashing mini-games. for example, the game goes to what looks like a cut scene, except the outcome changes depending on if you press a button indicated up on the screen in time or not. failure usually results in losing some of your life. victory results in a fairly violent end to whatever it is you’re up against. viking overdoes it a little bit because, for one, it just doesn’t feel like it’s necessary. for another, it’s the same sequence everytime, so there really is no challenge.
you can’t customize skarin’s looks or weaponry or anything at all about him. it seems like the bar for this has been set by a lot of previous games to where this is expected. even just a super minimal amount would have been nice.
sometimes it really sucks to find where you’re supposed to be going or what you’re supposed to be doing. i spent much, much more time than i felt like i should have trying to figure out the last part of a quest. i had discovered a cave blocked by a gate with a lock on it. i had to find a key to get there. so i left and completed every quest i could, but i still couldn’t find a key. it was only after i looked online that i found out all i needed to do was go back to the cave and kill the three guards there that had magically appeared. they would drop the key. what a hearty bunch of crap.
with that said, as i stated earlier, i’m actually having fun with it. i do have a little bit of a bias towards these games. i’ve played all of the dynasty warriors games (except for the most recent one) and those haven’t really changed much since dynasty warriors 2 for the playstation 2. and we’re up to DW6 now…so…yeah…
pros
- the grapics are nice looking. character animations are fluid and the frame rates stay fairly consistent
- blood and violence. lots of it
- mindless and quick; doesn’t require a ton of concentration
- combos are easy to remember and easy to pull off
cons
- repetitive
- camera can be a little wonky at times
- no character customization
- the sounds isn’t all that great
- you can generally get away with button mashing
- blocking doesn’t work like you think it would sometimes
- not enough combo/move variety
- story is throwaway
- no incentives to keep playing. you just plow through because you kind of just want to finish it
- button mashing “mini games” are stupid and don’t add much fun to the experience
- epic battles don’t feel very epic when you can just run right up to what you’re supposed to destroy and destroy it
- no control of your soldiers during battles
