Review: War of the Vikings

War of the Vikings is the new game developed by Fatshark, an independent game development studio based in Södermalm, Sweden. Its been released by Paradox Interactive, who have handled great games like Magica, Mount and Blade and Fatshark’s War of Roses. Using the same Close Quarters Combat or (CQC) Engine as War of the Roses, War of the Vikings throws players head long into the glorious, blood-soaked battles of the Vikings and the Saxon knights. In the battle, your skills can help either conquer or defend Britain.

The first thing you will notice with War of the Vikings is there is no single-player or campaign. Playing like Counterstrike GO or League of Legends with only online game play available, gamers have access to 5 maps across 3 game play modes. Those modes include Team Deathmatch, Conquest and Pitched Battle. As you play you earn experience for every kill, assist and flag cap, resulting in levels or rank ups for your Viking or Knight. Much like in Call of Duty, a level increase means you’ll gain access to other weapons and equipment which both change your play style and visual appearance. Fatshark plans to add more items with each update; already, a DLC pack is available for the game.

Default visual aspects of the game are set low and look quite dated, but once you push your graphics settings up to maximum, War of the Vikings looked a lot less like a 90’s game mod and so much more like you’d expect from 2014. It has fantastic details on textures and in smoke effects in particular. Sadly, those details meant little after I found myself stuck in the game’s tutorial, unable to continue on. I had to restart the tutorial seven times before it acknowledged that I’d met my objectives and should be able to carry on.

The game’s CQC is a both hit and miss system (pun intended); instead of the usual hack-and-slash mouse button spam as found in most games, it responds to the direction you’ve thrown your mouse after initiating the swing. A glorious overhead smash can be achieved by pressing and holding the swing button and drawing the mouse downwards, releasing the button when a power meter has gotten to the desired strength.

The power bar mechanic becomes a vicious game of cat and mouse; too much power may fail or your opponent may hit you first, and too little power and you may hit them but perform next to no damage. The same action with the right mouse button can be used to deflect attacks if you have a shield, or parry and attack if you only have a weapon. The downside to this system is that when you move the mouse to direct the attack block or parry, your character turns at the same time. This sometimes results in a movement away from your target when you release your swing.

The kryptonite of War of the Vikings is pure latency. It could be avoidable using an Aussie server, where ping was only 50-70ms, but the servers are empty. I had to resort to playing on an American-based server, which meant I was facing a latency of around 250ms or higher. The time advantage the rest of the world seems to have over Aussies in that case makes playing competitively almost impossible. Many times, I’ve gotten into the game only to find absolutely zero people playing on Aussie servers, so off to the American ones I had to go.

With this and its other minor bugs corrected, War of the Vikings can and will be enjoyed by many gamers of different genre preferences. I’m quite sure War of the Vikings will come bellowing out onto online competitive circles, resulting in many clans will be painting the British hills red.

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