Volgarr the Viking

Volgarr is supposed to be a retro tribute to old action platformers like Rastan and Ghosts & Goblins, but somehow manages to capture most of the bad and almost none of the good of each. You have the sword attacks of Rastan, but the enemies are too fast to rely on it alone so you have the spear for a projectile attack. Except the spear is clunkier than the Ghosts & Goblins attacks so it still feels awkward. Then you have the jumping, oh the jumping. Jumping was a rough part of Ghouls & Ghosts, giving you a very clunky unguided jump that tried to compensate by making it double. It's even clunkier in Volgarr and you have to make some precision landings with it. Again, Volgarr sets up obstacles requiring a mechanic to get through them, but makes the mechanic inadequate. Ask yourself how bad the control for jumping is to make Ghouls & Ghosts seem like Mario? You throw spears to make jump platforms. This part is annoying and adds nothing fun. On top of it already being the most annoying and tedious part of the game, they make it even worse by adding all these ridiculous restrictions to it. Spears will not stick into walls when thrown at close range. There will be tiny gaps you have to throw the spears perfectly through (which requires perfect jumps using the awful jump controls). It's just layers of unnecessary crap to an already boring process. WHY? And that's the big question. "Why?" I kept asking myself. "Why aren't I just playing Ghouls & Ghosts instead? On an emulator for free?" Unlike Shovel Knight, Volgarr decides to be a retro tribute without not improving on what came before, but actually making it worse. There's no reason to play this. The controls are worse than classic platformers, the mechanics more annoying, and it's downright ugly (they couldn't even be bothered to provide SNES launch era graphics).

To start the game, walk to the right. And so you walk and are given a very quick rundown of the game. Smash a chest; collect the shield. Kill a monster. Throw a throwing spear; use spears stuck in walls to climb the walls. And double jump for that little extra height and roll throw a hole in the wall. Simple enough and let's be honest, we didn't really need more than that in games to have fun. And so you leave the little intro area... and most likely die repeatedly. One hit the shield is gone. A second hit you are dead. And since those blue lizard creatures witshtand two hits, unlike the green ones, simply trading blows sword vs club is not necessarily a good idea. You ressurect at the big crystal and once more into the frey of endlessly spawnng enemies. You jump over spike pits, climb up and down ropes, always killing stuff and collecting gems, gold etc... and you die repeatedly. And that is as it should be. Repeatedly dying is what the genre is all about. And eventually you will survive and get that warm fuzzy feeling. If only there weren't those walls and the double jumping. It doesn't always look as if you would need a double jump, yet you do. You can't stand too close to the wall or you wont be able to jump on top of it. Yet the wall is narrow so you'll easily jump too far and land in the spike pit... And then deadlyness comes through akward controls. But maybe that too is just part of the learning curve. But even with all the deaths you come back for more.

So far, this is basically Rastan Saga++ HD. I'm loving every moment of it, including the brutal difficulty. The circle is complete. I'm back in my childhood.

This game tries to be hard for the sake of being hard. It's an intentional design choice but not a very fun one. Really it's just frustrating. First if you don't have a controller don't bother, the keyboard controls are ugly. With a controller it plays out much like 16 bit platformers of old, but it's insanely hard with no option to change difficulties. Instead of making more interesting gameplay, possibly leveling options or gear/move choices, the devs decided let's just make this as hard as possible so people repeat levels a bunch of times to win. The game has very little variety, just a bunch of hard stuff over and over, just you trying to master simple jumps and attacks to not die during the same level over and over. It's not fun for more than 20 minutes.

Feels more like programming a macro than playing a videogame.