By Jason Nimer
There is a song by a now-defunct band, Atom and His Package, called “Me and
My Black Metal Friends.” The song starts, “In the mountains of Norway, where the
weather is cold, there’s not much to do except kill each other and play guitar
in the snow.” Hilarious, yes, but it perfectly describes the current European
metal culture. Genres like power metal, black metal and sometimes death metal,
are quite popular over there. A good number of the bands are based around
science fiction, historical and/or fantasy themes. Blind Guardian, one of the
premier German power metal bands, devoted an entire concept album to J.R.R.
Tolkien’s “The Similarion.” Sonata Arctica has at least one song about a
werewolf on each of their CDs. Korpikaani is often referred to as “Viking
metal,” mostly due to their use of chants and the voice of lead singer, who
could have played just about anyone in “Braveheart.” These bands, and dozens
more like them, are just about the only music I listen to these days. So,
needless to say, when Viking: Battle for Asgard came in the mail, the first
thing I did was set up an iTunes playlist to listen to while I took control of a
warrior in one of the most violent eras in shared human history.
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As it turns out, one of the only positives that came out of my time with the
game was that I had something decent to listen to while suffering through the
worst historical game since Dynasty Warriors on PSP. Ok, so the game isn’t that
bad, but my love for the source material and the metal it spawned made Viking:
Battle for Asgard look much worse in my eyes than it would to average Joe gamer
guy.
Viking: Battle for Asgard tells the story of a lone Viking warrior, Skarin.
In a completely shameless Spawn rip-off, Skarin dies (almost), makes a deal with
Freya, daughter of the head honcho Norse god Odin (and horrible song/Guitar Hero
II abomination by The Sword), to live again and destroy a whole bunch of
monsters from Hel, which is kind of like Christian Hell, only with one less “l.”
That’s it. You know the entire story. No twists, no compelling goal or
fleshed-out characters can be found here; you die, you make a deal, you live
again and you rip apart generic demon after generic demon with little to no
rhyme, reason or purpose. Yawn.
The first thing I noticed when I fired up the game for the first time was
Viking looks, sounds and plays a lot like most 3rd person action adventures that
came out in the last ten years or so. But with games like Dark Sector, Gears of
War and Twilight Princess constantly bumping the bar ever higher, Viking ends up
feeling like a game that would have been great if it were released around the
same time as, oh, I don’t know, Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64. The environments
are bland and nearly devoid of life, there is a single button attached to
attack, jump, etc., effectively cutting off the possibility of any compelling
combos or maneuvers and perhaps most jarring of all, the game is played in near
silence. No background music, except for small swells when entering or leaving
battles, no voices, no birds or wildlife – nothing. Maybe its just me, but when
I think of Vikings, two main sounds come to mind – either the drunken howling of
any army singing sea chanties after a successful battle or the waves of sound
associated with a siege of some civilized town by wave after wave of warriors
would both have fit just fine. Instead, most of Viking sounds more like the
human resources department at a bank or office than a game about pillaging,
fighting the undead and generally causing historical havoc. I can’t understand
who could have possibly overlooked this in the testing/quality control phase of
development, but it really detracts from an already “just ok” game.
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