Viking: Battle for Asgard - Creative Assembly Ltd - 360

[Azazel]

Basically a 3rd-person combination between open world gameplay (not quite sandbox) and a hack-and-slasher with a big stealth element. Your character is a Viking, surprisingly enough. You died in battle to Hel's champion and now have been raised by Freya as her champion in order to save Midgard from the demons that have invaded at Hel's behest.

The main part of the game is in running around large open landscapes (there are portals located around the lands for fast travel), getting missions from NPCs, and sneaking up on and engaging Hel's Legion. Or Orcs, as I've been calling them (they look like PJ's orcs/Uruks) in hand to hand combat. You then sneak into and liberate settlements and so forth, which then gives you troops for the next forthcoming battle. If you free the prisoners in a camp that's not yet cleared of orcs, your vikings will join you. The big battles work similarly, the cutscenes set them up as epic battles, but they feel like a quick run of Dynasty Warriors as your guys basically follow you in a similar manner to DW games.

The combat is a huge part of the game, and so it's a huge shame that your viking doesn't control fast and smoothly. He feels heavy and clunky, with only two buttons to use for sttacks (light and heavy). After playing through Ravensoft's Wolverine recently, this combat feels awful when compared to Wolverine's fluid slicing and dicing.

One thing that's always mindless fun is the execution moves you can inflict on your enemies - once they've been hit enough to become mortally wounded you can usually hit X and then you'll execute them in some gory manner that usually involves the removal of heads and arms. When mobs die they release red orbs to fill your rage/magic bar, and occasionally your health bar. When you finish mobs with an execution, they tend to drop more orbs, but unlike Wolverine or God of War (or even games as far back as Soul Reaver) where the orbs will float over to your character, they just float in place until you walk into them, which is a bit of a fail moment.

I've been mucking about with it for about a day, and if I can finish it by tomorrow or the day after, I'll be happy with it.  I'll probably then put it aside for the next 10 months and gift it to a friend for their birthday. It's one of those games you play through, finish, then never look at again.I don't think I'll be replaying it on hard to achievement whore the last few points - though if you play it on hard, the achievements apparently stack.

Overall, if you can find it on a supercheap purchase like I did, you might not be upset at buying it. Not a bad game, but not a good game either. It's an ok little hack-and-slasher that you should hopefully get through in a couple of days if you're bored.

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Rent it
(Or download the demo)

[Azazel]

Put a couple more hours into it. Was doing a "collect all the skulls for the achievement" quest which just involved 2 srts of 6. While I'm 100% sure I got all of them, it's giving me credit for 11/12. So fuck that.

More importantly, in order to progress to the final battle at the end of Act 2, you need to collect all of the kegs of ale, which in Act 1 was just one of those sidequest things you could take or leave for some extra cash. Apparently I don't have them all, which then requires either beachcombing every beach in all of Act 2 again if I want to finish the game. Not that the game tells you how many of them you need to find or anything.

So, as I said above. Fuck. That.

A shame, but I have to change the BiiF recommendation from Rent/Buy Cheap to Rent/Avoid.

[Azazel]

Started back into this, after a few days to calm down and playthrough Battlefield. I also needed something that I could play with the volume right down while we watched TV at the same time, so I didn't want to start something new that may have had a plot.

I did indeed need to circumnavigate the entire second map to find all the kegs of ale (which apparently you can go back to ignoring in Act 3, as it was in Act 1). Several of them wen't anywhere near beaches (which is where you're told to look for them) instead being high on the top of seaside cliffs, etc. The game also doesn't tell you how many you have or need, so it's a matter of going back to the handin guy a couple of times to check (and then just saying fuck it and cicling the entirety of both islands).

Also found another bug where the game told me that I needed to complete a quest that I'd already completed. In fact the quest came up twice on my ingame map, once with a tick and then repeated without a tick. Decided to say the hell with the skull collection achievement, but I do want to finish the game. Finished the climactic battle of Act 2, now on to Act 3.