The original Volgarr was a bit of a cult hit on steam a few years back. In an emerging era of hardcore, retro styled, titles it managed to forge a path with its chunky, Rastan style, graphics and its heavy Conan the Barbarian influence it certainly caught the eye. Many players though struggled with the unrelenting difficulty. Don’t go expecting anything less than crushing toughness though, as the sequel forges the same unapologetically punishing path as its predecessor.
There’s little in the way of technical changes here. Volgarr
has pretty much the same move set and attacks as before. You can attack with
your sword, jump, roll and throw spears which can be used to stick in walls to
create makeshift platforms. A sort of double jump can also be done which also
swings your sword around, creating a sort of circle of death as well. Taking a
single hit kills you but you can also pick up rare pieces of armour which gives
you the ability to take more damage.
The game is tough, and you’ll die often, but when you die a
certain amount you’ll enter dead mode which effectively makes you invincible,
aside from deaths via pits. We found this to be an odd design choice. The game
is very tough but effectively forcing an invincibility option onto players doesn’t
gel very well. Once we had died enough to activate this, we found our interest
in the game soon started to drift away and it became a real slog. We could have
started the game again of course but it’s very frustrating that you don’t get
this as an option that you can ignore if you so wish.
Admittedly, we didn’t make it to the end even with the invincibility
option, but we found the level design and bosses to be somewhat weaker than the
previous game. The first Volgarr was tough but has a certain logic to it. The sequel
just seems unnecessarily frustrating and annoying in places. As a result, we
found we really weren’t having fun a lot of the time and the levels soon became
a slog.
With a game this difficult its vital the controls work well
and in this respect Volgarr is excellent. Controls are responsive and each of
the barbarians moves have a purpose and are easy to execute. It’s vital for
players to get used to the distances and animation cycles of all the different moves
as using the wrong one at the wrong time will almost always leave you open to
attack and normally death. This is especially important on ropes as getting
knocked off will almost always end in falling into a death pit.
A less drastic concession to the difficulty is that the
levels now have check points. Each of the stages are sizable and it’ll take you
between twenty minutes and half an hour to get through most of them. The
original game made you do this in one go so at least here it’s not as severe.
That said, if you lose all your lives, it’s back to the start of the stage you
can expect to be seeing the start of some of these stages multiple times.
Overall, Volgarr the Viking II offers up more of the same
and those who have beaten the original (there must be someone out there), will
no doubt be keen to take on the challenge. For us, this sequel doesn’t quite
have the magic of the first game though. It moves from ‘challenging’ into ‘frustrating’
far too often with too many niggly parts of level that you’ll end up having to
go through multiple times. As a result, it’s difficult to really get a rhythm going.
The almost invincible mode is also not wanted, we would at least like to see it
become optional on the continue screen as it took much of the joy of
progression away.
Overall 6/10
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