It has been over a year since Nintendo announced the Nintendo Switch, ever since that moment I have been in love with the console. I got it at launch and I am very happy with it. In the beginning, people were very skeptic about the games: “how many Switch games will we get in the first year?”, ” Will it get a lot of third party support?”, “Will it have the same fate as the Wii U” but nowadays we definitely know that the Switch gets plenty of games and almostevery dayy we get a new game or a new game gets announced. It is a good time to be a Nintendo fan but I still miss one thing. Although Nintendo has released a NES Classic and a SNES Classic where the retrogames get a lot of love, I miss the Virtual Console on the Nintendo Switch. I think it will come eventually but we have to be patience. In the meantime we can play some nostalgic retro inspired indie games. Shovel Knight is an excellent example but I think by now everybody has played this, but have you played Volgarr The Viking?
Volgarr the Viking is a side scrolling platform homage to the 80 video games like Castlevania,Rastan and Ghosts ‘n Goblins. The plot is pretty simple; you are a viking and you have to defeat an evil dragon, that is all you get. Armed with you spear and sword you slash your way to the dragon to kill him. This is easier said than done because this game is very hard and doens’t have many checkpoints so you better get good if you want to play this game. The hard difficulty is just like in the retro games where only “real” gamers where able to finish a game and not like nowadays where a 4-year-old kid can beat a game without difficulties.
When I first started playing Volgarr the Viking… I died! The movement felt very basic and I did not like it at all. I was determined to slay the evil dragon so I did not give up right away and restarted again and again and died a lot but after a while, I finally understood the movement and it made things easier(but it was still incredibly difficult to be honest).
This game is very hard and if you want to play it you got to get good at it and if you ever manage to get good at it, you maybe would want to go further with this. It’s short and hard in my opinion; the best cocktail for a fun and spectacular speedrun and the developers of Volgarr the Viking added a timer for speedrunners in this game so it definitely has potential to be a great speedrun game.
Verdict:
I know not everybody is going to agree with me but I don’t think Volgarr the Viking is a good game. Graphics are very bad and there is no big variety in enemies in this game, controls did not feel smooth and it was sometimes boring at times. You can say that it is a retro inspired game and that it needs to be like this but I disagree on that. In my opinion newly created retro games must have the feel of a retro game but need innovating mechanics to play as smoothly as we are used to nowadays. There are plenty retro inspired games that have succeeded in this but Volgarr the Viking is not one of them.
