When it came time for the programmers of Vikings The Strategy of Ultimate Conquest to put together the game's PC installation routine, they came up against the old DOS limitation of only eight characters for the name of the installation directory (folder for you Mac/Win95 folks). Obviously, the full title wouldn't fit, but instead of using the reasonable "Vikings" as the directory name they chose to abbreviate the full name. While I'm sure they didn't intend this, the resulting acronym-"Vsuc"-turned out to be an unfortunate harbinger of things to come.
Vikings purports to be a game of historical strategy portraying the activities the Vikings, or Norsemen, that both terrorized much of northern Europe and explored westward as far as Greenland and North America (some hold that they got as far inland as Minnesota, where I hear they met up with Elvis). At the start of the game your father (always the Jarl Olafson, no matter what nation you're in) is killed in combat; you, his only heir, must take over control of his small province and expand your empire from there. You can choose nation, gender, skill, and starting province for yourself; you start out with a small band of warriors, some ships, and a modest amount of goods and silver. Your map shows a small area of known land surrounded by ultimate blackness; from here you go out to explore, perform quests (yes, quests-we'll get to those in a minute), execute trade, and conduct conquest and pillage (quoting a comic I once saw, "Bert the Barbarian reminds you to pillage, then burn"). At this point, things don't seem too bad; the premise is good, the graphics you've seen so far look very nice, and the music is pleasant enough. From here, however, things head downhill.
As the game starts you are placed in your central village, a very nicely rendered scene of Norse simplicity. These various village scenes show some of the best research in the game-while hardly an expert in the history of the period, they seem to match my knowledge of how the Vikings of the period lived. Dotted around the village are a number of buildings you can visit: your headquarters, the tavern, the blacksmith, the shipwright, the "market" (really a trading post), and the rune woman.
At the headquarters you can mount expeditions, promote a lieutenant (they help lead troops in battle), and attend your holdings (wherein you basically let time pass; you can collect taxes, tribute, maybe a wife or husband, and, once you are married, a new kid every year or so (but only if you're playing a male; wouldn't want to restrict female warlords with childbirth, after all!). Too much time spent attending your holdings is supposed to be bad for your reputation, but it can be awfully good for your bank account; even at the tougher levels opponents will come to you to offer you silver to make peace, and by sitting around doing nothing you can pile up quite a hoard (and then buy enough equipment and hire enough warriors that who cares about your reputation). Now matter how long you sit, however, your holdings (or at least your village) are never threatened, so there's ultimately no impetus not to use the "sits-krieg" policy (tedious, yes, but then so are the rest of the paths to victory).
At the tavern you can order drinks (one nice touch is that your picture gets blurry the more you drink), flirt with the barmaid/server boy (with some ridiculously outrageous lines and an amazing amount of information about particular villages, forts, and towns, the server-person sounds more like a spy), the barkeep (who acts like the Associated Press ticker of the Viking world, rattling off screens of news bits in one sitting), a Patron (he often has quest maps you either have to pay or fight for), and the story teller. Ah, the story teller; you'll spend a lot of time fuming at the story teller (or at least, at his interface). You buy him a drink, and he'll tell you a legend that usually focuses on some object. Problem #1: He reads you a long story while you follow along the scrolling text. Unfortunately, you can't just skim through the text yourself at your own (faster) speed, you have to wait until he's done. Sure, you can click to skip the story, but then you only find out the location of the item you're going on a quest for, not what mystical benefits it's supposed to have (or even what it is). Sure, you can turn off the voices, but you still have to wait for the text to scroll by at the same speed as if the voice were still on. Deplorable! The legends are nice enough, but they're a bit long and you'll see them again and again; you may want to skim one you've already read (to refresh your memory) or you might want to just skim it the first time to get on with the game, but there's no way to do this. Also, I have to ask... why? These quests for mystical items (they improve your abilities or the abilities of your warriors) are out-of-place in what is supposed to be a historical strategy game. They are also tedious: you must search across vast stretches of sea and land (especially early on) to find the village, fort, or cave they might be hidden in, all for small benefit.
Much of your time will be spent out on expeditions, either exploring, questing, or performing diplomacy (usually at the end of a sword). On sea, your fleet is represented by a single ship, on land, by a single walking character. The navigation interface is simple: right and left arrow keys to turn right or left, "T" to move fast - that's about it. Traversing long stretches of land or ocean can be very tiresome, and don't dare run low on food when you're some distance from a town-irritating dialog boxes informing you that you are low on food will pop up every few seconds. Your Master at Arms will also pop up (in mid-voyage) with news reports; announcing things like an assault on Venice; where he hides his satellite downlink on a longboat I have no idea. Either on land or at sea you may run across some kind of group; you can choose to attack or ignore, and can always avoid encounters. I suppose avoiding attacks is bad for your reputation, but it's often tempting, especially given the combat system.
Ah, the combat system. This more than anything else doomed Vikings to a low rating. With land combat you can divide your forces up into as many as five groups (depending on the number of lieutenants in your current war party), assigning them to be either archers, fighters, or berserkers (only one berserker group per combat). The view then switches to a quasi-three quarters perspective somewhat reminiscent of Jagged Alliance, with each of your combat groups represented by a single figure (and a number representing the number of warriors left in that group). In real-time you point and click these figures about the battlefield (select with left button, order with right-a sometimes confusing mixture). Archers should be kept some distance from the hand-to-hand stuff; with swords drawn they are wimpy fighters, but their arrows are more akin to artillery than infantry weapons. If the group commanded by your character encounters that commanded by the leader of the band or village you are fighting, a challenge will be issued and you'll change to one-on-one combat mode (more on that below).
Sea combat is similarly simple. Maneuvering your fleet (again, represented as one ship) just as you normally do you attempt to chase down your opponent, firing arrows to weaken his ships and kill crew (while at the same time avoiding his assaults). I really wonder about the historicity ship-to-ship combat in the age of Vikings, especially with arrows, but I suppose for simplicity's sake it works. It can be difficult to catch up with the enemy (the best tactic is to trap him between you and an obstacle, like the edge of the combat area), but you'll want to try to grapple-sink his fleet and you loose the loot. When you do grapple you'll challenge the enemy fleet's captain to single combat.
Hand-to-hand combat-sigh. Now I understand why my adventure gaming brethren (and sistren?) hate arcade sequences plopped down in the middle of their games. With hand-to-hand combat you choose your weapon (mace, hammer, sword, or ax) and drop into a three-quarters view appropriate to the situation - ship deck, village building, etc. Then you start attempting to hack-and-slash (or bam-and-smash if you're using the mace/hammer) your opponent to death in real-time using a barely explained set of controls (keys 4-9 on the keypad to swing, 1-3 to block, or clicking on the on-screen number pad with the mouse). I suspect even expert action gamers would dislike these sequences; I loathed them. I believe I won once or twice (on beginner), and died the rest of the time. Unfortunately, you get into combat a lot, and once you do you can't save the game. So for me the choices were to die in combat, therefore getting nowhere, or to avoid combat entirely, also getting nowhere.
It could be that there's a lot of depth in this game, especially once you begin to really build your empire, but you'll have to go through a lot of tedium and a clumsy combat system to get there. Also, historically minded strategy gamers will want to avoid Vikings; in fact, strategy gamers in general may want to pass as the game (at least in its early phases) reminds me more of an empty version of MicroProse's Darklands CRPG than anything else. Lastly, if you do decide to take the plunge, I hope you're a fan of Michael Dorn's voice, as, aside from Alan Clement as the story teller and Ann Deagon as the rune woman, his voice is all you'll hear, announcing, yet again, that your family and Master at Arms have surprised you on your birthday.
