izigame.me

I picked this up in a sale for about £8. At that price point I can recommend it but not full price. I originally played Expeditions: Rome which is a fundamentally superior game in the series. If you haven't played either I would jump straight into Rome instead. If you've played Rome and want more then I would recommend Vikings but with some caveats. It is a more cheaply made, less matured game. For example there is almost no voice acting compared to the fully voiced, and brilliantly voiced Rome. These different production values lead to a different feel to the game. Rome was like an RPG where the fightinh mechanism was a turn based combat game, Vikings feels like a turn based combat game with RPG elements bolted onto the side.
At its core is the tactical combat and I found it enjoyable, reasonably paced, and more ish. But its not perfect, the start of the game when you have less powers is particularly dull, its just exchanging sword hits with enemies. As you level up tho the abilities and especially the ways to combine those abilities with other units becomes really compelling and your capacity to manage a battlefield greatly improves. Even so, as in all turn based combat games it has its quirks. Archers are too dominant so your first priority is always to neutralise them and much of the game is played very defensively around your shield units. The enemy AI is also at times not great even on higher difficulty. Sometimes it creates opportunities for itself which it does not exploit. It can feel sometimes that you are gifted victories you didn't earn. At other times the AI works its abilities perfectly and you lose fights in the first round.
The UI is not great. its clear they recognised this given the much cleaner presentation of Rome. It is not obvious where your extra abilities are for example. The toggle for lethal/non lethal is also not well placed. The level up system itself is also not ideal but coupled with the poor UI it becomes frustrating to navigate. A lot of your choices don't feel especially meaningful when assigning skill points and then some break points change characters from barely viable to absolutely essential.
You manage a team of soldiers (Hirdmen in the language of the game) but there is little reason to care about anyone other than your core 5. You can recover injuries in a single camp if your skills are well managed so you only have to use the others at a couple of specific story points which I won't spoil. The system in Rome where you had missions specifically for non core characters made me a lot more invested in the other members of my team. In fact you end up using these other characters mostly for doing chores when camping. This is unsatisfying to say the least. Whilst levelling is not that interesting, how you use them in combat is. Again, the rpg elements feel bolted onto that core tactical battlefield game.
Your progress through the campaign is at times not well explained. I had to use the Wiki to work out what I was meant to do at various points and the game does not signpost when you are taking choices that prevent some future quests. I am not the smartest so you can take that with a pinch of salt but at one point I did have to go back to a previous save after locking myself completely out of one of the major plotlines in the game and maybe a third of the game's content accidentally by pursuing another plot beyond the point of no return.
Overall, once I got through the first few hours and was able to give more abilities to my units I had a really good time. Each battle requires thought and provides challenge without ever feeling completely hopeless. Even losing scenarios just spirals you off into different plotlines. Like Rome it is a slower pace than something like X Com and some of my friends have bounced off the series because of that. Some elements of the game are underbaked, the UI is a problem throughout although not insurmountable, its clearly a cheaper, less matured game than its brilliant sequel Expeditions Rome but if you are prepared for that and probably wait for a sale then I'd recommend Expeditions: Viking to you.