A clean shaved viking, my god thats like a pirate without a boat!
STORY
Viking starts you off as a recently resurrected Skarin after having his ass royally kicked by a legion member. A Norse god called Freya brings you back to life in order to fight the forces of Hel, an other semi god thingy who well pissed off about being banished for allegedly trying to over throw Odin, Top god of Valhalla. She wishes to take over Midgard in an act of revenge or something, to be honest i never totally understood her motives to any great extent rather than just domination. Now were was i.... ermm o yeah! Right so Freya bring you back to life in order to be her champion to fight against the legions of Hel on midgard and to restore order and prevent the end of all things! So what do you do? well you get you viking ass in gear and tear up some legion hides and try and stop Hel's forces! As for plot strength its not the most original concept im sure anyone could think of that, its really the ending that sort of catches you slightly off guard. But solid enough plot for you to have motivation to kill legion scum rather than just the obscene amount of gore(which is just crazy...in a good way!)
GAMEPLAY
The gameplay in a sense seems really simple, not too combo heavy in other hack and slash games such as Ninja Gaiden but still fun enough to play around with. The combat is made up of quick hacks and slashes to shred the enemies. As well as these kick hits you can charge up a powerful combo by holding down the heavy slash button once when unleashed Skarin is going to go flying at the legion whacking them a few times. Once you get an enemy down enough the heavy slash button will appear over the guys head allowing you to do a really insane execution.(nasty looking but unnaturally satisfying!) On top of these moves you can get different weapon runes that will effect the weapon in a standard way. Ice rune freezes, fire rune ignites the bastards and lightning shocks the bastard. Each rune has a powerful attack when u hold down the two attack buttons that will kick ass in their own respective ways. As well as this when you use a weapon rune in mass combat your allies will in turn be effected by the power and will have minor usage of these powers. As well as these runes theres a sort of simple attack system by holding s shoulder button and pushing in the attack buttons a certain amount of times, Skarin will unleash a powerful attack breaking shields or just kicking the crap out of the enemy.
Mass combat work out as you and your army with your shaman run toward the enemy trying to take their shaman in order to halt their defense and close the Hel portals. Taking out these shamans can be made easier with the taking down of champions in order to get dragon runes in order to lay down some crazy ass dragon fire on top of those shamans head.....hmm i like extra crispy... The taking down of these champions plays out by weakening them then entering a button sequence kind of like God of War or shenmue(yes thats right there was a **** game that used button sequences before God of War, don't believe me? go look it up) my main concern with this was that the majority of the time depending on champion the same sequence played out, the least they could of done was made the buttons that appear abit more random to make it more of a challenge. An other issue i had some times what that there was slight FPS drops in these mass scale battles but i found they sorted out after a few seconds.
Before you go near a battle you need to do quests! o yes you got to get your ass in gear and liberate your fellow viking to amass an army to challenge Hel and her forces! This is done by liberating the men from bone prisons and killing the legion members holding them. Other times the ungrateful bastards will opt out of helping you unless you do an other task(i mean cheeky bastards, you break open a cage, kill their oppressors and they tell you to **** off unless you do more for them?!?!?!) truth be told though they are not all bastards some give you further tasks that help you by giving you items or further locations for more vikings for you. You locate more vikings through your world map but truth be told that thing to me is abit cryptic at times and i was off dandering in some direction the objective wasn't in!
The big problem that sticks out for me with these quests is that well....you do them far too often over and over again in a different matter or different isle so you slapped with the wet fish of repetition abit. I personally forgive this as the lay stone system helps traveling around abit easier and chopping up the bastard in obscene manners is just how i like my sword wielding madness!
VISUALS
From a graphical stand point the game looks super sweet, the environments look super detailed and the terrain has this cool shifting effect when you enter you terrain which turns really vibrant, while if you enter legion territory it turn all murky and blackened. however theres a slightly problem with the graphics technical stand point theres a few bits of glitching in life action cut scenes in situations were your taking down a giant. Other situations were you go to execute an enemy near a cliff or is standing near a drop, he will sort of glitch away from an execution.
CONCLUSION
In the end of the day viking will appeal to those gamers who love Conan style hack and slash games with abit of Dynasty Warriors thrown in when it comes to the mass battles. The game could of used maybe a month or two of extra time to polish it up abit graphically and playability when it comes to the mass battle. As well it could of used a online multiplayer for co-op action. Seems one of those things that seems like a reason addition to the game the designers didn't put it in due them them thinking either it wouldn't work or did not have the time to add. The game is worth a play through even if its only once esp if you have the xbox version as i managed to get just over 800 achievement points by playing through on hard :P go go achievement whoring!