We Support an R18+ game Classification

If you’ve all ready filled in your tax return and got a nice fat, greasy payout courtesy of some shrewd accounting, well screw you! You’re not my mum. I’ll file my tax when I want to. Don’t try and guilt me into it man.

Besides, why do I need all that disposable income when I can buy a copy of Viking: Battle for Asgard out of the bargain bin for $9?

Wait come back, I here you call to my muscular retreating backside, tell me more of this Viking and his Battle for Asgard and such. First lets talk about Vikings.

The Vikings were the biker gangs of the ancient world. While everyone else was discovering agrarian practices, philosophy and education and bringing in the enlightenment and the renaissance and other embarrassingly girly periods in history, the Viking's were all about carefully cultivating pyromania and kleptomania. They sailed into town, killed the men and ugly women, carried of the hot women and all the beer and for a laugh burnt everything down. Truly kings among men.

Vikings: if a ninja and pirate had a baby, it would be a viking

The fact that we aren't up to our arm pits in Viking games and instead are inundated with US military propoganda recruitment games is nothing less than the ultimate conspiracy, the lizard people who secretly run the world want us to believe that the hill billy comprised armed forces of the US are somehow superior to Norway's greatest export since Nordic women. But that's because they fear the return of the bearded, axe wielders of history who guzzled mead and split heads on a daily basis. Unfortunately Battle for Asgard isn’t a Viking simulator where you go from town to town pillaging and burning (note to game making people, awesome idea, fight the lizard power!). In fact the Viking’s of Battle for Asgard are having an uncharacteristic rough time of it. Queen of the under world Hel has unleashed her army of zombie Vikings on Midgard (our world) with the goal of massacring mankind and freeing Fenrir, the wolf god who will usher in the end of the Asgardian’s.

These armoured a-holes require a little panache to take out

Freya, the Viking version of Aphrodite only meaner and without the exposed nipples (as seen on God of War 3), recruits mute Viking warrior Skarin to single handedly chop the hell out of the armies of Hel. With hair like a Scandinavian porn star and a face like a crashed dump truck Skarin has to gather an army of Viking’s and lead an assault on the enemy camp in the local territory, complete with battles against ogres and using dragons to blitz battlements.

Things to do, battlements to storm, thatched buildings to set a flame

Moves include stringing together counter attacks, dodge attacks and combos to disable and then eviscerate enemies leading to many a slow motion removal of limbs, heads and even torsos leaving a streaming kite trail of blood and sopping guts behind.

My personal favourite, non sopping guts, feature of Viking was it’s open world approach that let you tackle objectives in each of the three regions of the game in whatever order you saw fit. You sneak into a campsite, stealth kill a few guards, free the captive Vikings and then join them in butchering their captors. Or run in and do the butchering yourself and let your mates out when the coast was clear.

Name: Skarrin, Interests: Chopping, slicing, eviscerating, hair weaves. Send a e-kiss?

Lumber mills, quarries, towers and various other locations need to be captured for you to gain the fighting force necessary to take out the main enemy camp.

So why wasn't Viking the biggest selling game of all time? Well I can't blame it all on the lizard people, Viking is not a triple A game, which you probably realised when you found it underneath forty copies of the Pirates of the Caribbean game in the bargain bin. It has it’s faults, namely the giant battles which you’re working towards are let down by terrible, chugging frame rates, gameplay can get a touch repetitive as you’re basically doing the same things three times over in each of the three regions and despite the fact there are magic waystones that can teleport you around, you’ll be walking great distances with not very much happening, and if you die when you get there it’s back to your last waystone. The third and final region is particularly bad for this with lengthy periods just spent walking through empty regions to get to your next strategic target.

But none of these are particular deal breakers to an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable game. I enjoyed the game enough to play it from start to finish in a week, about 12 odd hours of gameplay, despite some frustratingly difficult sections. The game is basically Crackdown with Viking’s instead of super cops and a grimy oil painting look instead of shaded comic book lines.

Support your local Viking community and spend a pittance on a copy of Viking: Battle for Asgard.