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When you first cast your eyes over the gruesome Viking: Battle for Asgard, while it looks every part the big budget next-gen game, you’d be forgiven for assuming it is just another third-person action romp with a bloodlust. After all, it is only the second console game from Sega-owned Creative Assembly; a company that specialise in incredibly deep PC Real-time strategies, and initially the action does seem a little ordinary.
However, Creative Assembly’s first console game was a pretty decent hack ‘n’ slash called Spartan: Total Warrior, that was certainly deserving of a sequel. Though Viking shares no narrative bond with its predecessor, it’s already looking like it could be the title Spartan fans have been longing for.
A slightly convoluted but well positioned plot places you in the role of Skarin, an up-and-coming warrior with the usual mix of flaws and talents that often befall a brooding, young male video game lead. Far above him a vicious struggle is unfolding in the realm of the Norse gods, as Odin enrages the Goddess Hel into raising an undead army that will consume the human world. The escalating feud will no doubt lead to countless horrific deaths, and most of those will be of your doing.
In the mission demonstrated for the first time at the Leipzig Games Convention, the opening minutes did involve little more than a touch of stealth and the odd quick kill, and quickly it looked like Viking was doomed to be another hack ‘n’ slash footnote.
And then a battle began. Vikings is all about the huge battles involving thousands of men who fight at close quarters with nightmarishly unpleasant melee weapons. If you’ve seen the incredibly well choreographed and savage battle scenes in the movie Braveheart then you’ll get an idea of the kind of brutality I’m talking about.
Back on the Xbox and PS2 Spartan: Total Warrior had a very good go at taking the hack ‘n’ slash into writhing, dynamic crowds, but its once impressive effort is sure to be trumped by Viking, which will no doubt throw in an axe after the trumping just to be certain.
Each battle, which is the climax of any mission, is absolutely a strategic affair, and the experience Creative Assembly has gained in making exciting skirmishes from producing the Total War series is evident. Your role, though, is not to give commands and order entire squadrons at your whim; instead you play a pivotal function as each conflict’s most powerful individual.
As the carnage develops around you, you must target specific and powerful enemies, or possibly flank the crowds to get behind your rival’s archers and take them out one by one. The shaman are perhaps the most dangerous of your adversaries, as they constantly respawn the undead, meaning they are usually your priority in the heat of a battle.
Still though, the emphasis is on action, and the way you pick your way through a battle and select targets is your own choosing. Specific abilities allow you to power-up the allies that stand immediately beside you, and you can call in fiery hellfire in the form of dragon strikes, that, with a little panache, can be made to coincide with potentially pivotal moments in the battle. On the whole, though, you are just one man amidst the carnage.
The battles themselves are also what give meaning to the other areas of the game that seemed so ordinary when first shown. It appears that rather than simply hacking your way to the level’s grand moment, you are instead recruiting troops and sourcing weaponry such as battering rams and catapults. Just how free roaming and essential this element of Viking will be is as of yet unclear, but it certainly has the potential to be a very interesting new departure for the genre.
Another significant element of Viking is clearly the gore. While the violence is generally far more ‘comic book’ than Manhunt 2, this is very much a brutal, graphic game, but a touch of tongue-in-cheek self awareness and a sprinkling of slapstick mean Viking should probably escape the attentions of too many sensationalist politicians and pencil-sharpening newspaper readers.
Dissecting your foes is the speciality here, and with a quick swirl of steel can you can quickly turn your undead rivals into stumpy torsos that gush blood as generously as the Trevi Fountain spews water. At points it does touch on the absurd, and regularly brings to mind the infamously ridiculous dismembering scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so you know you’ll almost always be playing with a childish smirk.
In the battles, the visuals and the audio are both moving quickly towards superb, with the sheer number of troops and their individual movements and animation being the most impressive technical feature. The hack ‘n’ slash is a genre restricted by its own definitions, but it seems that rather than be stilted by that fact, Viking instead is pushing the boundaries. That could spell disaster, but so far it is looking very appealing indeed.
