Total destruction
Imagine going home after a hunting trip, tired and cold, but satisfied with the booty and prospect of a hot meal near the fire, just to find the fire, but sticking everywhere to the homes of your relatives, neighbors, with destruction and death spread like a
stain of oil.
This is, roughly, the incipit of Vikings Wolves of Midgard ( Vikings from now on) that puts the player in the role of a personalized character to be created through the inauspicious initial editor, providing a handful of faces, beards and tattoos different, in addition to the two sexes.
The player will be thrown into medias res and will immediately pick up the weapon he chooses in the character creation stage.
The native village is infested with goblins (here called Tomte), snow giants, trolls and other similar monstrosities. are rocking and decimating the population of Ulflung (nicknamed Midgard wolves, whence the subtitle) without a reason.
Despite the airstrike between the enemy hordes, the population of the small village is halved by the fierce raid, and since the fallen is also the village
‘s older elder, the survivors elect the player’s alter ego to their new leader.
Instead of sitting in the jarl room waiting for better times, ours immediately head to arms, to end the work he has started, hurting the remaining enemy forces just outside the village, so that the few fellow citizens still alive.
From here, and for all the hours
needed to get the queues first (about a fortnight), the narrative behind Vikings reserves very few surprises, proposing a predictable and linear story, which at least has the merit of scrapping terms and figures of Norwegian mythology, so fascinating as little exploited in the video game.
The theme of revenge justifies continuous fading, and it soon ends with the mashing button and the loot and equipment management.
Courage or unconsciousness?
To be a development team that had never been touched with such an RPG action this time, Game Farm has shown courage in many of its game design choices, offering variations to the basic formula: the problem, how did you come up with Voting is that almost none of the solutions we have adopted has particularly impressed us, and although they tend to make Vikings quite unique, they do not make a better game of competition or a particularly advisable one.
Starting with a classic gameplay for the genre, with hordes of enemies moved by an artificial intelligence pointing more to the number than cowardice, the Slovak team has introduced a series of variables over consolidated fees, from loot management to that of the bailouts, by inserting unpublished dynamics such as cold.
We start from the loot, the soul of this kind of productions and drive for replayability: Vikings uses a peculiar system of equipment creation, which requires sums of money and raw materials that can be found on the field during the exploration, in the numerous boxes scattered around environments and even breaking interactive maps, such as trees, enemy totems, or piles of rubble.
Wood and iron are the most basic materials, almost always required, assembling which can be used to create weapons, shields and armor, relying on the help of the two blacksmiths in the village, who will in turn be forged to expand their constructive abilities.
This means that very rarely you will fall into really worthy pieces of equipment, with the exception of boss fights: this leaves a lot of taste for exploration, depriving the player of the classic “wow” moments to materialize in rare or legendary equipment in a Diablo(or Borderlands ) any.
