Vikings: Wolves of Midgard

Vikings: Wolves of Midgard is an isometric action-RPG from Games Farm, released in 2017, that plants itself firmly in Diablo-adjacent territory. You pick a Viking warrior archetype, hack through waves of mythological creatures drawn from Norse legend, collect loot, upgrade skills, and push toward increasingly dangerous enemies. The core loop is familiar: kill things, get gear, get stronger, kill bigger things. If that loop sounds appealing wrapped in frost giants and Ragnarok imagery, there is something here for you, but the ceiling is lower than you might hope. The class selection gives you a few distinct playstyles. You can lean into melee bruiser builds, ranged combat with thrown weapons and bows, or a shaman-adjacent path that leans on elemental abilities. Skill trees exist and offer some real choices early on, though by the mid-game the optimal paths become fairly obvious and build variety starts to flatten out. The blood sacrifice mechanic, where you spend health at altars to earn blessings from Norse gods like Odin and Thor, is one of the more interesting design decisions. It adds a mild risk-reward tension to resource management that the base combat lacks on its own. Co-op play is available and is genuinely the strongest reason to pick this up, since the chaos of the combat reads better when you have a friend along. The worldbuilding is where things get softer. Norse mythology is rich material and the game gestures at it, but the writing rarely does the source justice. Quests are functional rather than interesting. Characters exist to hand you objectives. There are no meaningful choices, no branching consequences, no moments where the narrative earns a genuine reaction. For a genre that has shown, even in action-RPGs, that story can carry weight, Wolves of Midgard settles for atmosphere as a backdrop rather than a foundation. The environments look decent for their era and the monster designs pull recognizable creatures from the myths, but the world feels like a stage set rather than a place. Technically the game runs without major issues and the difficulty settings give you room to tune the challenge. Some players will find the roughly fifteen-to-twenty hour campaign a reasonable ride at the right price. The problem is that it is competing, consciously or not, against Diablo III, Path of Exile, and Torchlight II, all of which push further on every axis this game touches. At the mixed review average it currently holds on Steam, the honest assessment is that Wolves of Midgard is a serviceable action-RPG that rarely surprises you. It handles the fundamentals without embarrassing itself, but it does not have the writing, the build depth, or the endgame content to keep dedicated fans of the genre occupied past the credits. If you want Norse mythology done with genuine narrative weight, look elsewhere. If you want a weekend co-op hack-and-slash with a Norse skin and you have already exhausted the better options in the genre, this fits that narrow slot adequately.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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