Viking: Battle for Asgard Xbox 360

The good:
Huge battles
Dragons
Copious gore
Visible entrails

The bad
Sound clearly done by interns
Shallow combat

5/10

Someone needs to start knocking a few points off those God of War scores. Not because they’re bad games. They’re awesome; the flying entrails, the huge baddies, the interactive boobs… But by succeeding with such a simple formula, now everyone is coming along to take a piece of the tripey pie. Take Viking: Battle for Asgard.

Sega clearly decided that first quarter 2008 was some sort of gore porn sweet spot and pushed Viking out the door just a couple of months after Nihilistic’s Conan, like an embarrassing kid brother. But when Viking inevitably runs home in tears, you’ll wish it had stayed indoors until it was less of a girly spazz. After all, we’re in the limb hacking brute category here folks. Things can be tough.

Your overactive pituitary monster of choice is named Skarin, who you’ll be pleased as punch to know is once again a shirtless tattooed hulk with a penchant for torso deconstruction and timed button pushes. He has a Link-like disdain for vocalising anything more sophisticated than grunts, but actually goes one better than Link in this respect by also refusing to concern himself with any weapons that couldn’t be repurposed to chop firewood.

When we meet Skarin, he’s done himself a mischief and is bleeding to death in a field. Luckily, a goddess named Freya happens to be in the neighbourhood and decides to recruit Skarin to build an army against this monstrous horde of undead that have been giving her no end of grief. There wouldn’t be much of a game if Skarin didn’t then set off to build said army.

Speaking of Armies, surely there isn’t a gamer among us who didn’t watch one of the battles in Lord of the Rings and think: “Man it would be freaking sweet if there were video games like this.” And shut up, I know they churned out two of those special feature bloated buggers, which even featured tens, yes TENS of characters on screen at a time.

What developers Creative Assembly have done with Viking, is take those tens of onscreen characters, and multiplied them by as much as TEN. This means that, screen size allowing, all you’ll see of Skarin is a bobbing ponytail and a little blue x icon indicating that someone is at the front of the appendage removal queue. Everything else is a sea of blue skinned undead and rather similar looking soldiers. Plus maybe some smoke and fences.

So, Viking is built around these massive onscreen battles, with the screaming and the swords and those massive horns that sound like God’s own flatulence. Who isn’t beating their own battle drum by now? But before you go lacing up your volleys and scootering off to Big W to slap down four twenties, a ten and two fives, there’s one thing I should tell you: The big battles are only about 10% of the actual gameplay time. Or even 9% if you don’t count the slowdown.



Most of the time, you’ll be watching Skarin gambol happily across the countryside like Julie Andrews on horse pills, occasionally stopping to cleave off a head or bodily tear open the door off a ribcage shaped prison until the rain stops and the birds can sing again. No, really.

Still, why can’t this be fun too? Getting around the impressively sized maps is easy using numerous “leystones,” which transport you to your desired location without a loading screen in sight. Most of what you’re fetching only amounts to keys, troops and gold, but there is a definite sense of progress as you turn your two button combos into threes and fours.

The stealth parts of the gameplay are also well handled, at least in terms of gameplay. Sure, on the surface it seems ridiculous: Skarin unsheathes his sword and axe about as quietly as a box of cymbals being kicked down a flight of stairs and carries a glowing amulet that might as well be a big blue searchlight, but the first time you charge five metres and subdivide an enemy hornblower, you’ll be grinning like the sick puppy you are, guaranteed.

There are more of those grins: when you first cast some magic in a large battle and notice it affects all your allies. When your armies square up and the camera sweeps across the battlefield, allied dragons circling slowly overhead. When you power up your lightning all the way and zap a giant.

But then, probably about mid way through the second map, you’ll be fighting off about five shielded zombies and think, “Dude, this is more like battle of Ass-guard, am I right?” You’ll realise that for all the gore, the combat is just plain unsophisticated. When you’re squaring off against multiple foes, it’s just quick attack forward, block, quick attack back. Repeat. Hell, Mark of Kri did this sort of thing a hundred times better, and that game is six years old now.

Then you’ll really start to notice just how god awful the sound is. The complete lack of ambient town noise. Or soldier chatter. You’ll barely hear celebrations, or cries, or even murmers above the scripted voices. The raging sea has three metre swell but is practically silent. Your parries sound damn near to placeholders. Then sometimes, you’ll kick open a door and there will be no sound at all.

What it all amounts to is the very definition of a rental. You’ll have seen all the good bits by the second map, and the final battle isn’t even worth the slog to reach it. The central idea of a beat em up in which you build up an army for a huge battle is worth a look to just about anyone, but don’t bother staying past the main act. There aren’t even any boobs.