That the Vikings theme is a bit inflated is undeniable but The Viking Way aims to do things differently. Those of Ice Lava Games have seen fit to bring to the monitors via Steam a video game that is based as much as possible on the historical sources available to create a game, if not faithful, likely to what happened in Northern Europe between the seventh and eleventh centuries.
The Viking Way appears as a full-fledged Viking life simulator. The character is not customizable (at the moment) but in any case it will catapult you in first person into a world that essentially offers you two things: trade or plunder.
The first activity can be very useful in the early stages of the game and is clearly preparatory to the second. Trading is indeed a bit boring and full of "grinding" but it could yield a nice nest egg to be able to afford a nice Viking ship and a band worthy of the name.
Within the settlements positioned along a really careless map we will be able to trade goods, enlist men and lieutenants, rest and frequent the tavern, where often extremely attractive women might be interested in us. Obtain gifts, of course.
Another proposal of The Viking Way consists of interactive sea travel. As you move, resources will be consumed at the end of each day (Mount & Blade style) and if we encounter ships ready to plunder we will be able to return fire with flaming arrows and ballistas (if we have made some upgrades to our ship).
When we decide to loot a settlement we will have to fight the battle on the field together with our men. From this point of view, our equipment (Mount & Blade style) and carefully assign level points (Mount & Blade style) will therefore become essential. There are only three settlements available for now: villages, cities and monasteries. While the available regions will be the Scandinavian Peninsula, the Danish Peninsula, Northern France and Britain.
From what we have mentioned it will therefore be clear that the game, being still available in early access on Steam, it's not finished and cleaned up yet. This can be seen from many (too many) details. First of all the bugs.
There hasn't been a single game where the Viking ship hasn't given us deep satisfaction setting off to travel the sea upside down like a Black Pearl in Pirates of the Caribbean. At the same time there are many assets of this game that seem to come from other parts (not only from Mount & Blade) and this is sorry because it denotes a certain carelessness of the developers. In addition to assets of dubious origin for now The Viking Way it's full of "Coming Soon" scattered here and there, even if the most annoying thing is certainly the functioning of "diplomacy". We walked the length and breadth of the map without ever finding an enemy. To have enemies you have to attack villages belonging to another culture which are reported as allies anyway. In short: you have to become a treacherous being to be able to play and above all you have to take the blame for the massacre of innocents absolutely free to see some action.
Maybe a game like The Viking Way it would have benefited much more with a strategic and management system. The game could have been conceived as a set of panels to manage one's own Viking business with a “live play” section for moving around, selling and buying goods or raiding villages. In any case, what is certain is that there is still a lot of work to be done to get someone to decide to spend some money to buy The Viking Way.
