Expeditions: Viking

This is the second game in the Expeditions series from a small Danish studio called Logic Artists, set during the late 8th century, and doing an excellent job of representing that tumultuous historical period. It is an isometric RPG (although the perspective is almost halfway between isometric and top-down) with turn based combat. The game has an overworld map for Denmark, Britain, and the ocean in between, and then when you come to points of interest on that map, you go into the local isometric maps.

The game faithfully recreates the general history of the period, while still giving the player a lot of freedom to shape their personal journey within the overall historical framework. You start as the son of a Danish Jarl who just died, under siege from those who would take over your lands, and quickly realize that in order to resist them, you will need to travel to Britain to gain resources, allies, and power. The first part of the game involves traveling around Denmark in order to prepare yourself for the journey, and then you go to Britain to meet your destiny.

The beauty of the game is that it does give you a lot of options to work with. You can play as the stereotypical Viking, and strike Britain with your full fury, looting churches, pillaging villages, fighting everything you see. This carries some downsides, however, and fighting everyone will make the game a lot harder. On the other hand, you could play more like the Swedes in Russia, and trade rather than fight everything. You can also do some sort of a hybrid approach, and alternate between the two. Likewise, you can pick different sides, and align yourself with different local Kingdoms, such as Northumbria or the Picts. Your actions will determine what is to come.

One cool thing that the game does is tightly tie in your adventures in the world with your Earldom back home. You can find a lot of resources on local maps, such as wood, iron, skins, and even slaves, and you can spend those to build up your home base. Improvements to it result in you accumulating power and prestige, which both opens up meta-game options, and also comes in handy later on in the story. There is no gold in the game, just a barter system, so you can trade different things with various traders, and the economy is very tight. Between spending stuff on home improvements, better arms and armor, and quest goals, you never accumulate too much goods, and this makes everything feel a lot more real and interesting.

The combat, which you will probably engage in constantly, is excellent, and is one of the best isometric systems I've ever played. Part of why I like it is because it's fairly historical. Yes, there is some "magic" stuff, like some characters being able to heal, or to cast battle cries which function like spells, but it's very low-key, and most of the combat is just proper 8th century warfare. Shields are supreme, and your front-line warriors MUST have them, because without them, the enemy archers (and then meleers) are extremely deadly. But with 3 warriors up front with shields, you create a formidable defensive obstacle, just like a real-life shield wall. While archers are killing machines against unshielded targets, they struggle against shields, which basically shrug off missiles while they are not destroyed. To get past the enemy shields, you can either attack them, whittling down shield hit points (the slow way), or you can use your axe-men to hook the shields out of the way. Swordsmen, on the other hand, are far deadlier, but do not offer as much utility. So for my party, I went with a sword/shield set up on my main character, and axe/shields on the rest of the front-liners. And then of course archers and a healer in the back. You can also have a two-hander Dane axe, or dual wield a berserker set up, but I found those too fragile to be functional.

Another beautiful thing is how the game handles armor. There is a HUGE difference between the starting leather armor and a suit of mail you get later on, after much effort. The mail provides something like 70% damage reduction or better (depending on the quality of the suit), and makes a huge difference to your survival. This is something games often don't get, but is very true to history. Weapons have armor penetration stats, and there are certain abilities to get past enemy armor as well. Bows do especially well against it, which is also true historically, since the narrow head of the military arrow can get past the mail rings rather easily, unlike say a sword blade.

Put all of this together, and the fights in the game are just a pure joy, with lots of realistic tactics, and pretty animations, and of course, enough gore.

The writing is well done as well, since the developers kept to simple down-to-earth dialogue (avoiding the trap of flowery drivel common to RPGs), and history provided them with a rich lore and story that easily outperforms stories about dragons or wizards or whatever. There are a ton of choices to be made in dialogue, as almost every encounter offers you ways to side with different groups, rape and pillage or defend or trade.

There are also some time limits in the game, as certain quests have to be done by certain times, but given that those are fairly generous, I don't think they will be an issue for anyone, unless you just roam around pointlessly for months. They do add a certain feeling of urgency to the game though.

In conclusion, for fans of history or just fans of good isometric RPGs, Expedition: Viking is an excellent game from a studio that will hopefully continue making these niche games. Despite its relative lack of publicity, I found this game to be way better than the more well known isometric RPGs that have come out in the last several years, such as Divinity: Original Sin or Pillars of Eternity.