- Title: Viking: Battle for Asgard
- Platform: Xbox 360
- Publisher: SEGA
- Developer: The Creative Assembly
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: Action/Adventure
- Pros: Huge battles; executions; decent graphics;
- Cons: Repetitive missions; shallow combat; there isn’t enough of the “good stuff”; framerate issues
Story
In Viking: Battle for Asgard, you play as a warrior named Skarin. He was mortally wounded in battle, but the goddess Freya saves him in exchange for his allegiance and that he will pursue the goddess of the underworld, Hel, and prevent her from taking over the land of Midgard.
Gameplay
Viking is an open world game that has a feel sort of like a next-gen Zelda or Fable. You travel around the world, pick up gold by smashing pots, and use your sword, bombs, and throwing axes to kill hundreds of enemies. When you first start, the game really hooks you and you feel like you are in store for something special. That feeling doesn’t last long, unfortunately.
The combat is the first problem. You have a couple of sword attacks, and after you wound an enemy you can press the X button for a gruesome execution. The problem is, though, that once you have seen the miniscule number of executions once, sitting through their long animations again is like torture. But you have to sit through them in order to earn extra red orbs that let you use magic. Also, while you can unlock new attacks at an arena, they don’t really help much so you are better off using the same two moves you started with. Not good.
There are bright spots, here, however. When you have freed enough Vikings and finished all of the tasks asked of you, you can launch a full-scale battle to capture a city. These battles pit hundreds of Vikings against hundreds of Legion soldiers in huge battles that are just epic. You even can call on dragons to help you fight. But, like everything else in the game, these battles are just repeated over and over. The landscape of the cities is different, but you always have to kill Shamans to stop them from spawning new enemies and there are giants and boss enemies you have to fight, but these fights are exactly the same every time.
The game just never changes. You repeat the same tasks over and over again. And even the good stuff is just repeated over and over. It will impress you initially, but once you have beaten the first (of three) islands, you have seen pretty much everything the game has to offer.
Graphics and Sound
Graphically, Viking: Battle for Asgard is a nice looking game. Skarin is nicely detailed, and the environments are good looking. There are only a handful of enemy and Viking types, however, which is kind of a letdown. In the big city battles, there are hundreds of characters all fighting each other with dragons flying overhead, and new characters spawning all the time and it is really, really impressive looking. The game is only running at about 15 FPS in these sections, however, which makes combat quite a bit trickier.The sound is a bit of a drag as well. It isn’t that it is bad, but there just isn’t much of it. When you are wandering around by yourself, there is very little sound and the islands just seem dead. When you do find enemies to fight, you are treated to the same sound effects and same grunts and groans and death rattles over and over and over again.
Bottom Line
