Review | Viking Vengeance

LifeisXbox’s Viking Vengeance review | Today we will take a deeper dive into an exciting game named Viking Vengeance. This special Rogue-lite Dungeon Crawler ARPG (yes, that is a lot of genres) was made by the people over at Lowpoly Interactive. It’s a game that tried to be a lot of everything but does so in an exciting way. So let me tell you all about that, shall we? 

We played Viking Vengeance for 5.5 hours on Steam. This game is only available on steam.

What we liked!

• Voice acting | When you first hop in Viking Vengeance, you are welcomed by a soothing narrator, which continues throughout the game! It makes you want to click on characters to hear more backstory. The story behind Viking Vengeance’s parts is interesting to listen to and indeed had me hooked.
• Eventual gameplay | When you get to the parts in the game where you actually have whole hoards of enemies to fight, you are in for quite an experience. Bugs aside (more on this later in the review), you will feel like a god slaying them all. And fun fact, you can even transform into one of the gods you are following! So that’s double fun. I tend to use my god powers to clear whole hoards of enemies and temporarily grant myself some HP to survive. Especially since your health bar can go down really quickly if you fight multiple enemies.

Somewhere between

• Graphics | When you look at the game, you shouldn’t expect the highest definition in graphics. And don’t get me wrong, you are not getting a deluxe detail pack. But instead, you get a functional set of visuals. But that left me kinda hanging. Certain characters feel visually disappointing. They really do feel blocky.
• Animations | The animations are also “functional.” They are there. If I weren’t used to a little bit of a smoother game, I would have greatly enjoyed them, but I feel that the animations are somewhat lacking, and they are loaded weirdly. You can see energy come, and if you stop moving, the animation will pause. Really weird, but hey. Then when it is supposed to be dramatic, it just throws your opponent on the battlefield. Strange mix, to be fair.

What we disliked

• Connection/Responsiveness | You are supposed to feel connected to your in-game characters as if you are playing this yourself. Usually, this goes automatically, but it couldn’t happen here. You will be banging your keyboard to activate your abilities. You will have enough mana to cast a spell, and the spell will be off cooldown. So, as a gamer, I assume that pushing Q would activate my Q ability. This is not the case. I more often than not found myself mashing keys repeatedly to get abilities to work. (Yes, my keyboard works just fine!) and it took all the connection away. It’s not mentioned in known bugs, so a big turndown for me. Also, the execute ability doesn’t work half of the time.
• Explanation | Brief point here, but while playing the game, you first get a great tutorial, but collectible quest objectives are not marked on the map. You can’t guide yourself through checkpoints using the large map—no way to mark something. Specific goals are barely explained, and you can’t hide the quest names during gameplay.
• Death | What I found weird is that you get the option to either respawn and pay blood (a currency) or restart your game when you die. Fair enough, I wish to respawn. So then I get to put on top of my own dead body, and “I have to find and collect my dead body.” Needless step, but I am not done yet. Then you realize that the game state will not be changed, and if you die in a whole group of enemies, you stand there with half a health bar to work with because you don’t respawn fully healed. This will make you want to eat food, but you will be dead again by then. You also can’t store enough blood for 2 respawns in a row, so you need to consume a blood potion as well then.
• Music | I will keep this point short. At first, the music is thrilling until you realize that this hype song continues the WHOLE time. Barely any other song will be played, and it all feels insanely repetitive. 1 hour in, I just HAD to go to settings and turn off the music. I was actually going mental by it. And don’t take this as a joke, I literally just did an annoying scream towards my girlfriend and just said, give me a minute, got to turn this sound off.
• Gameplay idea | Viking Vengeance is a great game when you look at its bare essentials. It is borrowing elements from Diablo, side-scrollers, dungeon crawlers, … and I think that the developers tried their best with this. But to be fair, it just is a whole lot of everything, but nothing significant came out of it. If they focused on 1 thing, it would have turned out fantastic, but I was left with a sour aftertaste.   
• Game speed | Viking Vengeance starts off slow, too slow. And if you factor in all the points I mentioned above, you probably won’t even get to the fun parts of the game. By this time, you will have bashed your keyboard, trying to activate your abilities. You will have disabled the music (if it didn’t bug out on you yet). You probably also will have lost the way an awful lot of times since the map doesn’t help you in the ways it should. Considering that you have 2 hours to refund a game on steam, it’s dangerous to make a slow game.

CONCLUSION

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