Thank you Rising Star Games for sending us this game to review!

Loki, the trickster, stole Odin’s magical (and only) eye.  Naturally, Odin is quite upset and now blind.  He fumbles around to the graveyard and resurrects four warriors of lore to reclaim his lost eye.    These warriors can fight amongst themselves in the five versus arenas, or they can embark on the story campaign that’s over twenty-five levels long and goes through eight different worlds.  Traveling around in Odin’s pimped out ship sounded more fun than brawling, so I began the story mode.

Up to four players can join in locally or online in this 2D platformer brawler game.  Unfortunately, I didn’t find anyone online to join me in my quest.  My brother came over and we played a few levels of the campaign.  Once we repeated the intro levels, we were able to play any level that I previously unlocked.  It was fun and the enemies’ difficulty levels were scaled accordingly.  At the end of each level our damage and gold collected were tallied and compared to each other’s.

Gold in this game is used to purchase new weapons and runes.  Each weapon has a unique ability and I liked the weapons earned from doing side-quests more than the store bought ones.  One of my favorite weapons was a cat tied to a stick!  How cool is that?  An angry cat that slashes at enemies for additional damage!  Other fun weapons include a sword made out of a witch’s nose that sneezes away foes, a skunk sword that repulses enemies with its stench or a sword made with the head of a shark.  

Runes have various powers including increased speed, damage, health, or regeneration.  I went with the health regeneration rune.  A few of the runes are meant for specific characters.  Some of the levels in the story are for a specific character who has to be in play for that particular level. 

Each character has their own special attack:

Hedgey – short but tough and can puke out exploding skeletons   Seagurd – Can spit out poison to slowly attack his foes

Caw-Kaa – Can do flying swoop attacks

GunBorg – Has a retractable arm that packs a lot of punch

As violent as these abilities sound, there’s not a lot of blood in this game.  When an enemy is defeated confetti comes out of them instead of blood.  Since this game is about zombies there are some detachable and missing limbs.  One of the levels has you returning a zombie’s head to his body.  Picking up detached heads is part of the revival process for fallen comrades.  By picking up I mean impaling with your sword instead of holding it with your hands.

Besides impaling and flinging heads there are moments in this game where you’ll have to fling around excrement.  Other issues worth noting include some sexual references, and a character’s unattractive butt is shown.  The zombie Vikings are required to consume a hallucinogenic mushroom to open up a new area on the map.  Last but not least is the language in this game which includes words like d*mn, b*stard, and cheap*ss (you’re called that if you don’t buy something from a shop).  

Given all of these issues, Zombie Vikings obviously earns its Teen rating.  Those that are old enough to handle this kind of game will enjoy the kooky humor and funny dialogue between the characters and enemies.  The cat like enemies with their threats of petting my hair in the wrong direction cracked me up.  All in all, the voice acting is well done and the background music is decent too.

The art style is rather unique with the paper thin characters that noticeably flip when they change directions.  The characters and bosses are nicely detailed with many of them being rather grotesque looking.  The levels are well designed and encourage you to go off the beaten path to unlock and access the side quests hidden within.  It’s worth going the extra mile for the side quests because the rewards are often good, if not humorous. 

All in all, there is plenty to do in the single-player campaign.  While many of the levels are easily completed solo, having multiple players in some of them really helps out a lot.  It’s a shame that I was not able to find people online to play with.   I’m glad that I had my brother and we had some good laughs together playing Zombie VIkings.