At first your instincts rebel, but eventually you get past the hump and it clicks into place. Coupled with WASD movement control, getting used to the hold-flick-release attacks is a lot like patting your head while rubbing your stomach. Especially when you have to master it while being sliced to ribbons by other players, since the brief tutorial - the only single-player content in the game - barely covers the basics. Only the smallest mouse movements are required, but finding the balance between registering the direction and sending your viewpoint off-kilter takes a lot of patience. It's a system that is both ingenious and infuriating, in other words. It's also similar, in principle, to how The Elder Scrolls delivers special melee attacks by modifying the strike with directional movement, only here the special attacks are triggered by a single button press while it's the standard attacks that require practice to get right. In intent, it echoes Dark Souls, with its emphasis on timing and caution, but the inputs lack the crisp efficiency and the movements lack the fluid grace of From Software's classic. The same is true of parrying, only using the right mouse button. Flick the mouse in the direction you want to strike and release the button to swing. Hold down the left button and you charge your attack.

As with War of the Roses, the game uses mouse and keyboard (there's no controller support) to simulate the actions of close quarters combat using ancient weapon techniques. Learning how to deliver those strikes is the biggest barrier to entry in War of the Viking's unsentimental scrum. Most of the damage is done up close, and most kills are gained in just a few well placed strikes. Forget rifles and shotties, here you get swords, axes, spears and bows. This is the follow-up to the Swedish developer's medieval battle game, War of the Roses, and it follows a similarly ruthless path.Ī multiplayer-only game, it takes the tropes of the first-person shooter and applies them, broadly, to a third-person melee style of fighting, where instead of modern armies, it's Viking raiders laying waste to Saxons on desolate cliffs, in rustic villages and through snowbound mountain passes.

In Fatshark's War of the Vikings, you'll be lucky if you last 30 seconds.

Thanks to war, hunger and disease, most Vikings died before they turned 30 years old.

War of the vikings