REVIEW – If you copy something badly, that’s not good. If your „clone” is just average, then you’d still need something to make your product memorable. Vikings: Wolves of Midgard doesn’t have anything that would make it as a highly remembered title in a few years, and still, it is a decent game with a slightly different approach to dungeon crawling.

Vikings already strays off Diablo III’s route where you have to choose one of five deities, who will form your skills and provide you perks in a few aspects. To give you an example, Loki is someone who prefers dual wielding, resulting in fast-paced combat, while on the other hand, Thor’s style is a two-handed, strong-but-slow attack. Don’t forget that you can play cooperatively with a friend, and if you two combine your combat styles properly, you could pull off gigantic chaos on the battlefield when your moves fill out each other.

Hit, hit, hit, loot

If you know Blizzard‘s game, then I don’t have to detail you the gameplay – you rhythmically hit your enemies until they die, leaving the loot behind that could contain magical weapons and equipment. How does leveling up work, you ask? Well, it’s not happening like in Diablo III where you gain a certain amount of experience points, and you immediately gain a level. Instead, you will have to find altars where you must provide blood sacrifice to select one of the gods’ skill trees.

Don’t forget the combos, either. After your successful finishing blow on an enemy, you gain a „window” to lock onto your next target quickly, and after killing a big mob in a combo will earn you more XP than killing them off one by one. This mechanic rewards skilled players. Don’t forget about that good old rolling to evade attacks, either. Without this move, bosses would kill you easily – let’s face it, a dungeon crawler wouldn’t be one without big baddies and rewarding loots dropping out of them!

Natural changes with the village people

What the hell kind of lead is that? Well, let me explain. The first half is regarding the nature, which will effect your character. For example, if you are out in the cold unprotected, you will begin losing health, and maybe even freeze to death, unless you find a safe spot to warm your body up. This addition to the gameplay will provide an extra layer of challenge, as you’ll have to take note of both your status and your combos, attacks.

The second half of the lead is regarding a village that you must nurture. The village is going to be your base of operations, and you will have to continue upgrading it to get more skills and better equipment – the former will also require you to reach the required level, obviously. How can you upgrade the village? You will need things such as iron, wood, and gold. Most of the bad guys drop these resources; you won’t be lacking any of these. You can also acquire at least some wood from your environment as well. If you’re not that kind of a peaceful Viking, you can choose one more method by rushing down other settlements, and if your siege is successful, you can choose between either getting one big reward or getting a cut each time you visit said settlement. (Lol, defense money in Viking style?)

Hah

The side-quests are f… reaking boring, to say the least. The developers seemed to have run out of creativity by this point in development. Kill X amount of enemies to get resources. I don’t even remember seeing anything different during side-quests! Also, I previously said that you could play the game with a friend, right? Well, you might think you could play it locally, right? FORGET IT! The game only offers online co-op, there’s no couch version of it. Would it be too much of an effort to make it available? Despite the humor here and there, this is just a missed opportunity…

A good choice for hack and slash players

Games Farm could have received an 8 out of 10 if they didn’t have boring side-quests, or maybe if they tried to include local co-op. With these issues, it only deserves a 7. It’s a good game, but you can feel that it could have been better. From the repeating maps to the gameplay that didn’t try to be revolutionary to somewhat dumb AI, Vikings: Wolves of Midgard is just a Diablo clone, but at least a fine one.

-V-

Publisher: Calypso Media

Developer: Games Farm

Genre: Dungeon crawler, open world action-RPG

Release date: May 24, 2017