ffronw said:
Viking: Battle for Asgard
Viking: Battle for Asgard drops you into the world of Midgard, where a fierce battle is taking place between the gods. As a young Viking warrior named Skarin, you are appointed as the champion of Freya to defend the future of mankind. The game features a very solid melee combat system, a great story, and a vast open world to explore, all developed by Total War creator Creative Assembly.
How on earth did this get on here? I can't speak for the console versions, but the PC version was panned, and quite rightfully so!
The voice acting is poor or worse, the animation is clunky and dated, the PC optimisation is so bad that
armadillos could have done it better, and the responsiveness of your character is slow and laggy making combat (especially large combat) the-opposite-of-fun.
With the good points out of the way, we can talk about the controls... the PC port is a port that's so badly done that even the "bad ports club" won't accept this game, and point and laugh at it when it passes by in the street! The game comes with enforced "stealth" sessions, which will fail the mission and drop you back at the start to repeat over and over
and over and over because the clunky animations and terrible controls make it virtually impossible
not to screw up somehow. Combat is unfun and repetitive (which is bad for an "action" game, m'kay?) and there's no "sprint" or similar to get around, leaving you trudging from place to place like a particularly unenthusiastic day labourer. The majority of the mechanics are blatantly ripped from elsewhere, and stuffed in with no customisation or thought as to whether they fit or, indeed, belong in the game.
I'd heard rumours about this game, but it had VIKINGS in it, so I waited for a Steam sale and picked it up for like £2. This game
could have managed mediocre, if it tried harder, but it didn't. I
still regret spending those £2's, given how bad this game was. It's not "criminally underrated", it fully deserves the High-School Swirly rating it gets!