Volgarr the Viking

perfect!!!!! scratched a 2d action platformer itch I had

This reminds me of a lot of the old-school platformers I played as a kid...Golden Axe came to mind immediately for me, mostly because of the look of it, and Castlevania, mostly because of the difficulty. I have read some of the complaints voiced in other reviews, and I can see the points the other reviewers make, but I disagree with them myself. All in all, this is a fun game. The graphics, music, and sound are great. Some of the game mechanics may make things more difficult for the player, but this is no different than old games from my NES, Sega, or SuperNES days: some games had double jump, some didn't...some had attack-during-jump, some didn't...some had direction-control-during-jump, some didn't...etc. I didn't find the mechanics in this game to be any more of a hindrance than any other, and some of our favorite Great Old Games were HARD. (To this day, I still haven't beaten the original Castelvania!) The game mechanics force the player to go "old-school," as in, memorize enemy habits, memorize trap timing, figure out patterns, and the like. In my estimation, this is a positive point, for fans of old-school games. So to wrap up: graphics are sharp and nice-looking, with bright colors and interesting locales to gaze upon. Sound effects are nice, with some ambient sound effects to fill out the experience. Music is evocative of the action of this hack-and-slash game. Difficulty is just that: difficult. This is a game that is unrelenting. You either get through, or you start over. This game only loses a star for not have various difficulty settings for those who don't wish to try that hard and only wish to experience the game's ambience. Otherwise, I recommend this game for fans of old-school games who like an old-school challenge.

Fiendishly difficult and unforgiving, a real treat for anyone who loves the old style no 'quick-save' hack and slash platform games. Every death is frustrating, but like a good warrior you can't help but get up and carry on.

This game is proof of the value of the phrase: practice makes perfect. The controls are very basic: walk, jump, double jump, sword attack, throw a spear, climb. That's it. Those are allt he tools you need to beat this game. Apart from one thing: perseverance. I didn't get that far in the game yet, but I persevere. And this actually makes it sound to negative, because it's a whole lot of fun to do so. The graphics are very nice, the sound effects as well as the graphics of kills and power-ups very gratifying. When you die, you simply try again, yes, back from the start or the latest checkpoint, but every retry is a further step into perfecting your runthrough. This game is not very forgiving, and allows everyone to play it to maste rit to such ane xtent as to allow near-perfect playthroughs. I haven't achieved it yet but I'm planning to, having fun along the way. It's a bit like learning a song on the paino, timing the pushing of buttons just right. Only it's easier and at least as much fun (and alsmost as gratifying).

This game is terrible. It looks great but is boring as shit because it wants you to play that same part a million times. It's controls are garbage, the one thing they emulated very accurately is how bad lack of jump control, and fluidity of attack animation was in old NES games. You're stuck with garbage control of your character in a game that has no saves and checkpoints. It's made more infuriating because the game looks great. The graphics are awesome, the enemies look cool, its just a shame you'll spend all your time battling the same 3 lizards because you'll have to memorize every jump and enemy until the next checkpoint forever away. I payed $3 for this game and I want my money back. It's a tease of what an amazing experience it could have been.