Viking: Battle for Asgard is a one trick pony; its only trick being the ability to immerse players in real time epic battles that span vast fields involving thousands of participants. It would have been a novel concept to begin with, but developer Creative Assembly already pulled off this kind of feat on previous generation hardware with Spartan: Total Warrior, in which the protagonist took on hordes of Roman soldiers on the battlefield. You’d be justified in thinking that the move to new hardware would benefit this sort of a mechanic, but sadly the game’s wafer-thin budget and lack of soul or substance make it a mediocre hack-and-slash title at best.
In Viking: Battle for Asgard, players step into the boots of one ticked-off warrior called Skarin who fights alongside Freya, daughter of Odin and Goddess of War, to overcome the evil engulfing the land of Midgard courtesy of Hel, daughter of Loki (God of Mischief). To do so he must rid three of the game areas off undead Viking soldiers using an army of fearless (living) Vikings that must first be rescued from various Legion camps spread all over the area.
While the concept sounds pretty interesting, its execution is anything but. For starters, nearly every camp looks the same, populated with the exact same character models for both the undead as well as the living Viking soldiers. The actual act of rescuing soldiers plays out exactly the same way too. Sneak into a camp, kill a couple of guards using stealth, break open the cages harboring the captured soldiers, and use them to finish off the rest of Hel’s minions, thereby banishing evil from that particular area. From time to time you’ll also indulge in some boss fights that play out the same way every time; slash away at them for a while until context sensitive actions pop up, after which you kill them in violent ways. Hurray for monotony!
Once you amass a large army you can take out camps that cannot be infiltrated individually. Such skirmishes elevate the game momentarily, as watching hundreds of your troops converge upon an unsuspecting camp only to slaughter its inhuman inhabitants mercilessly can please the sadist within for a while. Once you’ve liberated all the suppressed parts in an area, you move in for the final battle that seems like it’s stepped out from a Lord of the Rings flick, one that was made with a shoestring budget. Sure, you can summon dragons to help you out and all, but as expected each of these battles play out the same way and if monotony wasn’t bad enough, frame rates during such battles reduce to a slide show.
@prasanth. Not many people know of this game, and when they see it in shops they will be in doubt, so this review will help those people to know that , this game is not worth purchasing.
