Viking Gods and Soccer

Another week another update. This time about a game I decided to give a chance after hearing positive things about it and a SG win.

I’m a big sucker for stuff based on norse mythology so I couldn’t help but get my hands on this game and give it a try. At first it took me a while to get into it because the mechanics are vastly different than most puzzle-platformers, but once I got used to them (more or less after I cleared out the first level) it started to grow on me. Some of the levels were quite pleasant to play in like Vanaheim or Helheim, some were really annoying like Niflheim (as well as Muspelheim) and Svartalheim (fuck those beams), and then there’s Asgard which is a combination of every previous levels and becomes the most frustrating level ever (thank Odin it’s short).

In the end it lived up to my expectations and anyone who likes puzzle-platformers should try it.

I won this game back when I used to join most GAs blindly and it was about time I gave it a go. The first thing I saw when I started it was a connexion timeout, and the game has no offline mode so I was about to drop it until I saw in the forums all it needed to get that fixed is increasing the connection time (which is insanely short) in the ini file so it doesn’t timeout right at the start.
Once I got to start it I discovered it’s not your usual soccer game but actually it is a very complete simulator game that takes pretty much everything into account. You can train your character to improve their skills, buy stuff to increase their lifestyle, manage the chars relationships so he gets along with everyone and his happiness level remains high (or else they’ll fail easy shots), and of course play soccer games. Doing actions consumes the character’s energy, and playing games with low energy increases your risk of injury (and believe me, you don’t want to get your character injured) so you have to carefully choose what to do between games.
While the game starts being a tad challenging it gets really easy once you upgrade your stats a bit and you get the hang of how to score goals. You could easily score about 5 goals in a single match by yourself. As you might expect the game gets quite repetitive later on since you’re playing the same matches against pretty much the same opponents (unless you got transferred to another team) until you end up retiring 20 seasons later. I stopped once I won the World Cup because there were no new challenges after that.