Vikings: Wolves of Midgard (PlayStation 4) review "I will say that if people started calling me the War Wolf, that'd be pretty damn awesome!"

Vikings: Wolves of Midgard is a Diablo clone. It's not as good as the games in that series, but if you're not currently playing Diablo IV or still enjoying one of the prior games in that series, you could do worse than this game. I know I have!

In what might be a shock to anyone who ignored the title of this game when I typed it in the last paragraph, it's based on Norse mythology. You're in control of a Viking warrior (or shield-maiden) whose goals start out simple. His (at least when I played) village is being overrun by a bunch of monsters and he has to clear them out in order for his small tribe to have a chance to flourish. From there, it's off to dispel an ice demon from the area and fend off a rival tribe or two in order to increase his town's standing.

But things won't be that simple. That attack on his village was instigated by a powerful giant who has his sights set on doing stuff that will lead to Ragnarok. Opposing that villain is an equally unfriendly giantess who also seems to have dire ambitions. And across the sea, there is another race of humans who aren't exactly tolerant of your character's endeavors to unite the Viking tribes. And with how their leader has been blessed so that no human hand is capable of striking him down, they're a pretty big threat by default.

Throughout three chapters, with each containing a decent number of levels to hack, slash, bludgeon and otherwise maim foes, you'll work to dispel all of those threats and more, while also seeking out allies and necessary artifacts. At the beginning of the game, you'll choose which Norse deity is your sponsor, which will determine which of five skill trees you'll be focusing on, with each dedicated to a particular type of weaponry — sword-and-shield, two-handed, dual-wielding, bow and magic staff.

And from there, with one notable difference, you'll be playing Diablo if one of the games in that series was made in 2017 by a smaller company named Games Farm. You'll enter a level, kill every damn thing that's either alive or undead, collect the loot they drop and continue doing so until you reach the room containing the boss fight. Dispatch that thing and you'll be whisked back to town for a bit of dialogue to set up your next destination.

Or you might possibly return to that same level. As you progress through the game, you'll regularly be given "hunt" missions, which require you to revisit stages in order to kill a certain number of a certain monster. Is this blatant filler? No doubt, but you'll want to do this stuff for reasons unrelated to PlayStation trophy acquisition. First, you'll need to acquire lots of materials such as wood and iron throughout your quest in order to upgrade your village's shops, so you can purchase superior goods. Then, you'll need more of those materials in order to craft those goods. Finally, as you get closer to the end of Vikings, you'll be thankful for each and every level all of these trips grant you because the difficulty does get pretty rough down the stretch.

Here's how healing works in this game. You'll be able to find or purchase various flask-like goods that give you between two and four health replenishments. In each level, there are a number of fountains that can be used once to refill your health and flask and then subsequently for just you. Early in the game, it seems you can't cover more than a handful of screens without stumbling into a fountain; however, by the end, those things are spread far apart. Combine that with how hard a lot of the enemies hit by this point and it's very easy to get overwhelmed with no recourse other than to waste a lot of time backtracking a fair distance to simply get a full health bar.

Sure, you get a number of special attacks via your skill tree, but as one expects from a game like this, they're on cool-down meters, so you can't count on using them constantly. Which made a couple late-game bosses a real tedious chore as my two-handed weapon specialist found himself running away from them and their powerful melee attacks for what felt like hours, while chipping away at their health painfully slowly due to how my only ranged attack had about a 20 second cool-down. Why didn't I play as a ranged-weapon user? I had so much fun doing that in Diablo III...

There's also the fact many of the levels themselves want to kill you. The major deviation from the Diablo formula revolves around environmental hazards. That early-game level where you challenge the ice demon serves as an introduction to this mechanism — probably why there are so many fountains. It's a frozen wasteland, so you'll constantly have an exposure meter rising as you walk around. The only way to lower it is to stand next to the fires conveniently lit throughout the place and you'll want to do that with regularity because if it fills completely, you'll take constant damage until you've either reached a fire or perished.

And it won't just be the cold that threatens your life. There are fire levels, poison gas levels, lightening cave levels and whatever the hell it is in the crypt/graveyard levels. With some of them, you simply have to be in a place where the damaging element doesn't reach; while others are like the cold levels, where you have to stand in specific anti-element locations. This all comes to a head with the final full level. In lieu of actually having safe zones, it simply mixes fire and ice so that one element is always raising your meter and the only way to lower it is to reach a place governed by the other element, which will first lower the meter and then start raising it again. Let's just say performing that juggling act over a large level while constantly being assaulted by powerful foes is the sort of ordeal by which many mythological heroes became deities.

Vikings was a fairly fun game, although a handful of levels could get a bit tedious and frustrating due in large part to that environmental damage aspect. Kill a few foes, run back to a safe zone, kill a few more, run back — not the most enjoyable way to experience a game that's all about arcade-style combat. If I wanted to nitpick, I could criticize the game for feeling a bit disorganized in how it handled its plot. I'd go from fighting soldiers from that rival nation and then get sent off to try to form an alliance with a powerful underworld being and then I'd be back to fighting more of those soldiers like I'd never taken that detour. Hell, I could even mock the game for undermining its attempt at an epic tale by giving your character the dialogue of a particularly snarky Nordic bro.

But when push comes to shove, the main complaint I have about Vikings is that it's a by-the-books Diablo clone that's content to stay in the competent zone. Its one true addition to the formula winds up being more of an annoyance than anything else, while everything else resides firmly in the "been there, done that" camp. It's nothing exciting worth going out of your way to play, but if you're a fan of this sort of game, you'll have a reasonably good time journeying through it.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (July 27, 2023) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.