I decided to give in to my primal hurty instincts and I went out and bought Viking from JB. From the reviews, it just looked like one of the many ‘brutal fighting games’ that game out around the time of Ninja Gaiden, Heavenly Sword, Assassin’s Creed and Conan. I’ve only played it for 15 or so minutes, and I can pretty confidently say, it is. However, I haven’t really done a lot other than hack up grunts to pieces. And when I say pieces, I mean pieces. The devs also made a nice little decision to keep the mangled corpses around the landscape instead of simply letting them disappear. My problem with games like Ninja Gaiden and Heavenly Sword is they are not brutal. Not that they were meant to be, but they are sold as having vicious combos and moves. The thing is, ninjas aren’t brutal, slim, sexy chicks(pixels though they may be) aren’t brutal, they rely on speed and finesse in the killing. This is reflected in the great graphics, smooth action and the blood. It spills with each sweeping slicing strike.

Viking, Conan and God of War are brutal. The characters are brutal, the moves are brutal. The graphics are dark, often poor, but there is blood spilling everywhere, the clean smooth strikes are replaces by powerful hacks of oversized weapons. The first eye opener in Viking only came when I got into combat, the movement is pretty slow, the main character looks like a rather hefty Norseman and it takes a bit of getting used to, but the fighting is just insane. The first finishing move impaled the bad dude on my sword, and the Viking went for a straight decapitation with his main hand axe. However, instead of making a clean cut, this took 2 hacks at the neck. Something that simple does wonders for atmosphere. You ‘feel’ the aggression and imagine that if it took 10 blows to sever the head, you would still hack till it’s off.

There was also a small stump of spine sticking out of the neck-hole, further showing how it was not a clean swipe and just pure rage that killed this baddie. So there you go. 1 mob, 5 second fight, sheer brutality.

Pretty cool huh?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 10:11 am and is filed under PS3, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.