Vikings is an "action rpg", in that inimitable Diablo fashion. You run around beating up on all kinds of things, finding, buying and making newer and better armor and weapons, and learning new skills to help you kill more things, get better stuff and bigger skills. It's a well trod path. But Vikings does it pretty well. I played on a 4k monitor with "just" a nVidia 1070 graphics card and it looks spectacular. As you run through the snow, you can get up to waist deep and it piles up against you as you push through it. The water effect is grand and all the spells have shiny graphic splashes. Your character gets dressed up nicely with fancy new armor and weapons and looks the part of a Viking warrior. Each level had a set of bonuses, like get 5 iron skulls, kill 10 fire demons and destroy 15 enemy huts. They generally took about an hour to play and each had multiple checkpoints, where if you quit the game, you could restart from there. However, if you went back to the village, you would have to do the entire level over, which was a bit of a drag. It wasn't wickedly challenging. I don't think we ever failed to clear a level on the first try, save perhaps once, in the last level. But we ran into our only bug there, where the magic entry gate refused to open after a few tries, so we had to go back to the village and retry the level. We found the elemental damage annoying. Many levels had cold or heat that would build up on you and you would have to find a small area to disperse the elemental buildup. Pain in the butt. And I never really did much for a weapon, just upgraded a couple of times. Runes and rune slots were at a premium, so we didn't get to play with that much either. It is also one of those games that encourages you to "play again" on a much harder level - thanks but no thanks. So if you like a good action RPG, you could do much worse than Vikings. Pretty glitch free, looks great, and has a very streamlined, yet interesting gameplay.
Played this online co-op and got maybe half way thru. It's a perfectly reasonable grinding, action RPG, but to me it got sunk by its sameness. The storyline wasn't particularly compelling but, even worse, the character customization, my favorite part of any RPG, just wasn't that interesting. Bash away at countless enemies, and then continue to do it more. Just a little too much grinding for me without enough strategy or character growth. Probably more like 3.5 stars, as it is above average but I wouldn't put it into the 4 out of 5 stars category.
