There's a lot about Viking that will seem instantly familiar. You play a mortal, chosen by the Gods to bring down Hel, Goddess of Death and her undead army. The quest sees you journey across three free-roaming islands, liberating enslaved Vikings to swell your armies and re-capture key cities as you...

Name: Viking: Battle for Asgard Genre: Hack-and-Slash Adventure Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3 (Reviewed on Xbox 360) In the weeks leading up to its launch, I heard absolutely nothing about Viking: Battle for Asgard.

There's no online or co-op about this game, thinking along those lines should be paramount in this day and age, yet it does add time and development cost to a project. What you do have is a solid singleplayer experience with brutal combat and vikings!

If mashing buttons to kill hundreds upon hundreds of enemies is all you're looking for in a game, you very possibly may enjoy Viking: Battle for Asgard. However, if you like original ideas, a story, meaningful exploration, a working camera, or fun, you'll want to take a pass on this one-way journey...

Combat can be amusing for a few hours; Portals make travelling easy

After a few hours; the combat gets dull; Objectives and missions are repetitive; No payoff for exploration; Camera is horrendous; Audio is sparse and disappointing

Scandinavian history isn’t the most encountered setting for video games. We’ve seen every nook and cranny of Greek mythology, but the Brit

Viking: Battle for Asgard

Opening up gaming to the masses is one hell of a double-edged sword. Sure, make games more approachable, with intuitive controls and a steady learning curve. By all means introduce rechargeable health systems and automatically save progress as you go along.

Norse mythology is one of those rare untapped scenarios in videogaming, and after spending some time with Skarin – the lead character in Creative Assembly's first console opus – you'll wonder as to exactly why it hasn't been properly plundered before.

Thank you Peter Jackson, for translating J.R Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings into three massive movies about a short guy taking the long route to a mountain, finding it, and then saving the day as if he'd fired a proton torpedo down the exhaust vent of the frickin' Death Star.

You don't judge your progress in Viking by high scores, percentage complete or rankings. You measure it in blisters - that old school b...

Visceral combat; Tightly-scripted story; Great controls

Sound lacks atmosphere; Too-simple puzzles; Struggling camera