When Vikings Attack! (PS3)
On a sleepy day in the British Isles, vikings suddenly attacked. It didn’t matter to them that it was the modern day, they showed no fear of the military, and they all charged in with the singular purpose of raiding the unsuspecting towns of anything they can get their hands on to carry it back to their ships. It fell on the citizens to defend themselves from these invaders, banding together into small groups to do what they can to knock out any vikings they see by hurling those items the raiders desire right into their faces.
In When Vikings Attack!, the government is very hands off in their response to the viking invasion. Rather than dirtying their own hands, The Department of Vikings put in charge to developing a response to the threat releases a set of instructional messages the player views as they make progress in this cartoony action game. Structured like the old public service announcements heard during war time, these short and simple vignettes are both useful for introducing new game mechanics as the adventure evolves as well as delivering small jokes that make their appearance a bit more amusing than mere tutorial messages. Most of the game will just be about going from one location to another to fight off every viking there, but the game does eventually build up to turning the tables on the vikings and heading to their homeland to learn why these anachronistic vikings are suddenly attacking modern British settlements.
Each level starts with the player having at least one citizen ready to fight for their country, the player guiding this character to recruit other people simply by approaching them as they run around in a panic. Your crowd of people can grow to a rather large size if managed well, but the reasoning behind raising your numbers is twofold. If all of your people are knocked out you lose and need to respawn from the last checkpoint and bigger crowds are able to lift heavier objects. A large group means you can afford to lose some people while almost always being able to use whatever items you find against the vikings, but it does become harder to safely maneuver them and the end of level optional score system rates you on civilian casualties in addition to how quickly you beat the level and how well you defeated the vikings in it. In a nice bit of mercy the game will almost always spawn in a few extra people if you get reduced down to one so you aren’t left floundering during a boss fight or particularly tough wave of vikings, but it is a shame you have little control over how the group moves beyond walking about as a circular crowd. Some levels even have very thin walkways people can fall off of or the vikings might get their hands on something that can cover a lot of space to make it hard to dodge with your simple dash maneuver, so losing people is just an unfortunate truth a lot of the time.
Funnily enough, the viking opposition works in a very similar way to the British citizens, gathering together in large groups so they too can pick up objects and hurl them about. Outside of boss encounters, vikings are always of the same power level as the player, they just have a lot more characters entering the screen at once. This turns most encounters into teams of vikings and one team of civilians running around a space to grab what objects they can to hurl them at the opposition. If a character is hit by a flying object they’ll be bowled over and removed from the group, and depending on the object’s size it is even possible to wipe out an entire posse with one good throw. Progression through a level usually just involves entering a new space with new objects to hurl about and fighting increasingly longer waves of viking forces, and while there are a few small puzzles in sections like the factory levels, this does get rather old rather quickly. Running about, grabbing an object, and tossing it is a gameplay loop that doesn’t demand too much of the player, and while there are some extra maneuvers like dashing when an object is about to hit you to grab it or dashing into a viking group to steal the object they’re carrying, it’s not going to change the fact this method of fighting is incredibly repetitive.
Item and level variety is one way the game tries to keep things fresh, and while the different stages and tools do give you something to look forward to as you progress, there are not too many big shake-ups to the formula. Sure, you might pick up and toss around zebras and penguins at the zoo, fossils and model planets at the museum, and all kinds of vehicles across the many city levels whether they be a bustling metropolis, beachside vacation getaway, or quiet farming town, but besides the size and how the object bounces it’s not altering how the game feels to play much. Some stages do introduce hazards like active traffic and conveyor belts that try to push you off, but it’s again to minor to help much. The visual diversity can distract from the stagnation, the amusement park having little carnival games you can participate in for no prizes and the rooftop level featuring a very nifty albeit useless set piece involving the rather obscure gasometer structure.
When Vikings Attack! does recognize it should be attempting to add new aspects to its very basic combat though, and that is where The Department of Vikings’s videos come into the picture. They’ll introduce new ideas at the start of the level like explosive bombs that blow up when they make contact with a group of people and white bombs that convert vikings to your side if they hit. Some aspects like bouncy environment pieces just appear without a good introduction though and become vital to defeating the shield viking boss since you can’t attack him head-on. One issue with making certain items important to certain fights though arises from the fact your group of people will pick up the first item they touch automatically when their hands are empty. This can make trying to snatch incoming bombs instead result in you grabbing an item and getting nailed by the explosive, and some areas aren’t really laid out well like a certain spot in the mall filled with tables and chairs you can’t help but grab. This lack of full control over your pack of civilians can lead to frustrating moments where you can’t play with strategy because an interesting item is surrounded by trash you’ll need to chuck away first, and some boss fights even rely on having their arenas cluttered with things you can’t even use against them.
Boss fights range in quality primarily because of their set-ups. Some are unique fights like hurling bombs back at a viking flying machine, but a lot of these battles are either with hordes of armored vikings who can only be killed by explosives or hazards, the shielded vikings who will always turn to block incoming objects unless they ricochet off something, or just large brutes with a lot of health. The shielded vikings that reappear quite often can often end up the most frustrating since you rely so much on the environment and item placement playing nice, although the worst fight is definitely a shielded viking on a conveyor belt who can only be defeated by knocking him over the edge but he almost never goes near it and barely budges even if you hurl constant objects at him to try and push him towards it. It seems a luck dependent fight, but many of the battles have that luck element present since the way objects fly is hard to reliably predict in these chaotic little fights.
There are some unique citizens to find just for completionism’s sake and a few that give you some helpful boosts during play like one that speeds up the group’s movement. You can play in co-op with each player moving their own group of civilians around to fight, but it’s not going to patch over the encroaching dullness of the gameplay format. Grabbing and throwing over and over without much thought is surprisingly effective, and even if you do start snatching items as they’re tossed at you, that just means you throw them back and hope it will do its damage this time. Vikings in the main Quest Mode take a while to realize they can steal your items though, but the competitive multiplayer mode does mean you can utilize these tactics to slow down battles that seemed to be relying on their frantic, fast paced nature to make up for their lack of imagination. The Quest Mode battles do manage to drag on even if you do try to keep things speedy just by the quantity of vikings found in each wave and how slowly they’ll enter the battlefield, so the game even forces you to consider how long things have been going on thanks to those inevitable waiting periods between batches of viking opposition.
THE VERDICT: Its sense of humor, item designs, and variety of locations all give When Vikings Attack! a nice cartoony feel, but the English wit and silly objects featured in the fights can’t soften the boring repetition of the combat style the whole game is built around. The loop of picking up and throwing objects over and over is barely iterated on, and some of the ideas that do try to break away from that basic formula lead to excruciating boss fights or segments where mechanics like automatically picking up any object you touch becomes a frustrating problem. There’s a tiny bit of room for tactical action in the group fights, but it’s not going to stave off the inevitable stagnation caused by the roots of the fighting style being so mindless and chaotic.
And so, I give When Vikings Attack! for PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. The funny thing about When Vikings Attack! is it did realize it needed to iterate on its design principles to try and prevent the gradual decline in interest inevitable to anything shallow and repetitive, but it adds so little to its base formula and even ends up recycling ideas more than introducing new ones. Having the armored vikings show up that require specific items is good because then you need to safely make you way towards those tools and utilize them well, but fighting armored vikings again and again as bosses in areas that mostly just provide what you need to beat them isn’t the way to go. Far too much of the game is spent up against basic vikings that don’t require much trickery to overcome, the variation in regular objects doing little to spice up these long samey battles. More unique items like the bombs would definitely help, and adding more meaningful level interactions like having the gasometer’s rise and fall actually feature some enemies attacking or the amusement park’s attractions actually rewarding you for beating them would add set pieces that are more than just set dressing. The core battling is just too basic to be carrying so much of the load without much iteration, and so When Vikings Attack! loses its appeal long before it runs out of levels.
It can be satisfying to throw things around for a bit, that being the whole idea behind a food fight in a cafeteria after all. However, very quickly it loses its luster and picking those same things back up to keep hurling them about feels hollow by comparison. When Vikings Attack! thankfully isn’t quite as messy as chucking stuff around the room in real life, but it does have that same issue with longevity since such primal acts rarely hold appeal for longer than the immediate thrill. When Vikings Attack! touched on adding some more life to the concept, but like its villains, its a game that rushes in without any big ideas or plans, and after that doesn’t work out, it’s often left scrounging around for the same things it relied on previously to try and make do.