Viking: Battle for Asgard (When Games Go Wrong)

[Kane Knight]

(This is longer than I'd originally planned and a little ranty. If you just want to get to the point, skip to the tl;dr and question at the very bottom).

Wow.

Now, I got this for like 5 bucks and all that, so I'm not going to complain about quality. I sort of knew what I was getting into, but there was one thing I was not prepared for.

This game totally tries to do the "God of War" thing and misses the mark on almost every front. It's almost an art form the way they manage to fail to be GoW.

--The graphics seem to be only at all superior to GoW in the sense that this wasn't a PS2 title. Now, I know not every game can have the production values of GoW and not every game has to, but with the scope of the scenery and shit, you get the impression they're trying to.

--Combat is more or less the meat and potatoes of this sort of game, and while GoW is fluid, this imitation is sluggish. Special abilities are handled kind of like GoW, except you have to earn them in an arena, so no powering up mid-mission. Not that it matters. The abilities are more limited and there are less options, especially since you only have one weapon set. Oh, and Magic sucks. You have three runes, fire ice and lightning, and they work until yoru magic bar is drained completely. Ice is so useful, I'm yet to have either of the others compare. One particular annoyance is a reliance on dodging in some circumstances. When you're up against 6 or more guys, the camera won't look in the direction you're facing, and you're supposed to hit a timing based defense, it's a crap shoot. It's okay if it's one on one and you're in an open field, but that doesn't happen often. posssibly at all with the legion champions you most need it for.

--Speaking of combat, QTEs. While I'm not a huge fan of QTEs, GoW used them to make you fel badass. The first time you fight a legion "boss" in Viking, you basically have a QTE that's "mash A to stab in face." Compare that to Kratos' fucking whirlwind of doom, where he's bashing, stabbing, and snapping? No. Later ones are a little more complex, but they miss that key function of "Make it awesome." You can finish any enemy with a finisher by hitting "X" once they're beat up enough, but there are only a couple variants, and they get boring after about ten. They also slow down the combat. Which is a shame, because if you want more magic, you need to use them.

--Exploration was cool in those Greek ruins. And not-so-ruins. The locales in this game are often bland and samey, to the point I'm never quite sure if I'm hitting a location for the first time or not. It's cool that it's "free roam," but there's little point. No XP means no improvements. You can't even get gold from enemies, so running around killing more stuff does little but suck up your time. But to find the gold, you have to wander around. Oh, and platforming is rigid and stiff.

--Upgrades again. It was a little sucky keeping track of XP and Gorgon's Eyes and Minotaur Testicles or whatever, but you kept upgrading shit in GoW. Upgrades are limited in Viking, so your character feels stagnant. You get like, one health upgrade per island (Of which there are 3 I think), and once you've got all three runes for magic (about five seconds in), there's no learning new stuff. Well...You can summon dragons, but that's not really the magic system. You learn a few new combat tricks, but nothing too terribly cool (despite awesome names). There's not much to buy, either.

--Diversity. Viking still has fantastic creatures, but the number of different creatures is limited. Even when it comes to more powerful enemies, it's usually "spellcaster" or "assassin" rather than "Medusa" or "heterosexual linebacker..." Sorry, I mean "Minotaur." Bosses are straightforward both in the sense that (This is from FAQs, as I haven't beaten it yet) there is little variety in the characters used and there is less variety in the strategies used. GoW mixes it up some, with strategies that at least make you look to the environment to see what you need to use (at the worst).

Maybe it's because Greek and Roman mythology is such a part of the American zeitgeist, and most of what we seem to know about Vikings is Thor and drinking, but the Norse had a very deep belief structure with all sorts of cool baddies and locales ripe for the picking.

And that is, I think, why I even bothered to rant about a game this bad. You can tell they wanted to be God of War so bad, but the game comes up short on every front. Except for making the Vikings Scottish, because every culture should be more Scottish. God of War isn't even the pinnacle of depth of imagination and mythological exploration, but it does a great job for a hack-n-slash that is mostly designed for awesome.

The one thing they did that was different from GoW I'd like to see improved upon by some other beat 'em up series, a good one, is you have to recruit Viking tribes. And I'm all "fuck yeah! Tactical elements!" But they're just quest requirements, really. Like needing a key to open a lock, you need X clans to "open" Y battle. And you get on the battlefield, and they just charge forward and fight with the enemy horde. No dynamics, nothing even all that cool, since it just looks like a clusterfuck. And a dull clusterfuck.

Dynasty Warriors has always had a morale system, and you could raise and lower it by doing things like saving allies or completing objectives (or failing to do so). I always thought the one thing that element was really missing was the capacity to make tactical decisions. Not to the extent of a TBS or RTS, where you micromanage shit to the nth, but still. An implementation of something like that, where there were large battles and some tactical control would have made those battles awesome and the GoW cloning a little more tolerable. I'm pretty sure that's been done before. Just don't remember where.

For 5 bucks, it's not a terrible game. But 2 years ago, they wanted retail for it.

tl;dr: If you're going to rip off a well-done franchise, at least do a half-decent job.

So...Now that that's out of my system, anyone else got examples of games that try and be something but go horribly, horribly wrong?