Vikings: Wolves of Midgard PC Review

Not many aRPGs give the opportunity of visiting a handful of worlds from Norse mythology and redecorating them with the dead bodies of their inhabitants. Vikings - Wolves Of Midgard is one game that does. From meager beginnings in a besieged village, to becoming the chieftain of the Ulfung clan, you’ll kill Jotan, Trolls and other Vikings while sacrificing their blood to the gods. The mildly promising start, however, doesn’t quite manage to build up necessary momentum as flaws begin to pop up the more time you spend with the game.

Vikings - Wolves Of Midgard puts you in the boots of either a Shieldmaiden or a Warrior who can choose from a pool of six gods to follow. While the first set of choices determine your character’s gender, the gods act as classes, offering a set of passive and active skills. Each god’s skills (or gifts, as they’re called in-game) can only be used when wielding a certain type of weapon. Here is where we encounter one of Vikings - Wolves Of Midgard’s flaws. The skills themselves, while providing certain good moments, aren’t anything of note. As I mentioned in my Vikings - Wolves Of Midgard Preview, they are run-of-the-mill slashes, dashes and area of effect attacks. At times they’ll have a certain element assigned, making them stronger against some foes but weaker against others and that’s about it. The great majority of these skill trees are passive skills which act as simple stat upgrades. You’ve seen them before, they make things go down faster, but they rarely offer great satisfaction for using them. Linking skills to different sets of weapons does not necessarily encourage hybrid builds either, as, while switching weapons is done by a quick press of a key, you’re switching one bland thing that deals damage for another bland thing that deals damage.

Vikings - Wolves Of Midgard’s combat system features a roll mechanic. Your main resource, stamina, is used for both skills and rolling. In my preview, using a gamepad, I found it fiddly.  Since then, keyboard controls have improved things a bit. Assigning directed rolls to WASD and a roll that follows your direction of movement to the Spacebar, makes it easy to use. It obviously comes into play when avoiding strong stuns or AoE attacks from larger foes, or when avoiding being overrun. However, some issues still remain. Rolling around shielded opponents is still difficult to do, as is avoiding certain stun attacks that a few bosses deliver. This happens because shielded foes move with you while the mentioned stun attacks home in a little too easily. Rolling becomes mandatory on difficulties higher than normal which brings me to another gripe I have with it. I’m all for including new elements into a genre’s combat system. I’m also aware that Dark Souls didn’t invent rolling away from foes. However, there were times, when I found myself using it, only to go in and land a hit, before I had to roll away, waiting for another opportunity to get in and land another hit. This came out like the game was trying to convince me that it could also do Dark Souls, sort of, which felt unnecessary. On normal, provided you build a bulkier character, you can end up taking a decent amount of damage without worrying too much. On higher difficulties, this necessity to constantly roll away from foes simply kills the flow of the combat.

There’s a decent number of creatures from Norse mythology to slay. Some of their models look really nice and imposing, while others less so. This extends to the environments as well. You’ll visit a number of places ranging from beaches to castles, caves and icy plains. Exteriors tend to look quite unimpressive, especially during daytime. Nighttime and interior areas benefit from good lighting effects and use of color that make those areas a pleasure to look at. That being said, I’ve had variable framerates while playing on the highest settings. Lowering the preset to Simple, as we’re talking about a Unity Engine game, did yield some improvement, however even then, when things got hectic, the frames dropped. I’m not excluding the possibility of my older i5 CPU to be the cause here. With the developer having not released recommended system requirements yet, however, I’d advise caution unless you’re the owner of an at least somewhat meaty system.

The inventory system in Vikings - Wolves of Midgard is not without problems. When choosing the “show all” option, equipping certain pieces might be difficult as, fairly often, clicking and dragging one item equips a totally different one. This, however, can be solved by choosing specific item categories which are organized in a neat, easily accessible list. Equipped items are marked with an exclamation mark which, at first, can be easy to miss. In between missions, you’ll visit your settlement where you can sell gear, upgrade vendors for better stuff and level up the character. Weapons with socket slots can have runes added to them. Available runes are only accessible in the vendor’s inventory and, opposed to the preview build, there were no tooltips this time around. This led to me adding runes at random and discovering their effects only after I’d added them. In this case, it was good that, for the most part, they’re just marginal upgrades. Every raid will nick you a hefty amount of loot which you’ll have to sell to vendors for resources. Selling these items will quickly become infuriating as you’ll have to patiently drag each and every item to the vendor’s inventory, and then answer a prompt that asks you if you’re certain about wanting to sell. A look at Titan Quest, a game that came out more than a decade ago, would have yielded an easy solution to this. Should you require extra resources, be it for weapon crafting or vendor upgrades, you can go on hunts. These hunts are basically levels you’ve already passed through, with the same bonus objectives and an arbitrary main objective. My time with these levels was short as, in order to obtain the resources from the bonus objectives, you needn’t complete the main objective. This means that I popped in, got the one bonus objective I needed, then returned to the village, as you can do that at any given time. The town offers access to the Trial of the Gods, a wave-based mode that also yields resources and, should the later waves be completed, items. I never felt the need to play this past the first two tries as resources came by easily enough and, from a gameplay standpoint, it’s just more of the same.

The items in Vikings - Wolves Of Midgard are split into a couple of tiers, depending on enemy and vendor level. Should drops not provide anything satisfying, you can always craft weapons, armor and trinkets in your hub. When crafting, you select the type and tier of weapon, with actual numbers and effects being generated randomly. The game also rewards items, among which you’ll always find one of legendary quality at the end of each main mission. Legendary items, and some of the regular ones, look the part, however, they have no interactions that modify your approach to combat. They just provide passive bonuses which, in the case of legendaries, are better or simply more in number. The one exception to this rule are talismans which do give extra skills that range from summoning a boar to turning enemies to harmless pigs or dealing different forms of damage. You can swap these around freely, even during combat, however they’re not enough to truly make fights feel varied. The game also features artifact weapons, which require players to find fragments of them in levels. I managed to find all the fragments for Mjolnir but couldn’t build it. Upon finding all the pieces, a prompt popped up telling me I could now assemble the weapon in my inventory. The only problem was that there was no sign of it in my or the vendors’ inventories.

The story Vikings - Wolves of Midgard tries to tell comes out as nonsensical. The shieldmaiden, apart from being thrown into alliances that aren’t entirely justified, is a failed attempt at a femme fatale, coming off as a character with an identity crisis. She goes between a semblance of an actual badass lady and an angry teenager. Then there are the few times dialogue choices pop up, which allow options that can make her sound like an actual leader. The instances where the writing comes off as clumsy aren’t just related to the Shieldmaiden, though. Her exasperation of battling the same enemies or going through the same motion when it comes to blocked paths will also be felt by the player, although, I’m not sure if that’s the best type of identification to have in your game. At one point, she asks whether any of the other seemingly important characters can actually do anything, to which the Seer, who also acts as a narrator, tells the Shieldmaiden that nobody is forcing her to do anything. This happens after several moments when the Seer explicitly tells the Shieldmaiden that she has to do stuff in order to save the world. That being said, the conclusion of the story, while nothing new or unexpected, is done nicely. There’s some neat art going into the cutscenes and, upon reaching the end, it felt like it deserved a better build-up.

Levels force you into taking the longer path because of keys that need to open doors or doors that cannot be brought down. The character even becomes exasperated at this, however, self-consciousness does not solve the fact that levels always work the same way. Invisible walls block you from jumping down side-paths, leading to much unnecessary backtracking. To top it off, every level ends in a final arena where you get a prompt that explicitly tells you that once in, you cannot return. While it’s nice to have an extra chance to go back and get the bonus objectives you’ve missed, this, alongside what I mentioned earlier ruins immersion. Every direct path is blocked by something and it becomes obvious that this happens because the developers want you to go through hundreds of mobs. Unmistakably, it’s an approach that other titles also take. However, here, there’s little to cover it up and keep the player onto the idea that yes, they’re going to slaughter that fire giant and feel like a badass! With immersion being broken so often and skills being so basic and unimpressive, the further I got into Vikings - Wolves of Midgard the more frustrated I felt. You’d also expect that after encountering two enchanted doors the mighty chieftain would borrow a mage from somewhere and just fling them at the bloody things. Alas, that never happens and you’re left constantly circling around.

Length is not an issue when it comes to Vikings - Wolves Of Midgard, especially as you’re offered a New Game+ mode that strips you of your gear but allows you to keep your skills once the campaign is completed. By that point, however, I found few reasons to go through the entire thing again. Tedious combat is something you don’t want in an aRPG and there’s plenty of it here. With its lackluster skill trees, it’s difficult for Vikings - Wolves Of Midgard to cement itself in the current landscape, as there are far better alternatives. That being said, it does make use of a setting that not many aRPGs approach and, for some, that may be enough. Others looking to fight for Asgard, can take the Seer’s advice.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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