Expeditions: Viking

This game is older, so if you are looking at it now you are likely buying it during a sale. As an on sale pick up, this game is absolutely worth it. If its full price, you may well still enjoy this a lot, but you simply have to know what you are buying.

This game is a point and click adventure with text based story line. The story is cliche, with tropes aplenty. The combat is an old school, turn based hex-movement system and works pretty good. Your attributes are permanent and don't increase with level, you level based on quest progression not combat, characters must be specialized as well-balanced characters are effectively useless, shields are a must, and you cannot replace hirdmen once the first 10 are selected.

I didn't understand all of this on my first play through and ended up getting to a point where I couldn't advance further because I had under leveled characters, under leveled gear, and I hadn't specialized my forces.

I have now reset, and I am enjoying my second play through even more with the increased understanding.

A great, classic style RPG. Tons of fun if you like the genre, and absolutely worth picking up.

Expeditions: Viking is a tactics RPG where the player is the ruler of a small town in Denmark which is threatened by another clan. You’ll need to recruit a band of warriors and travel to Northern England and Scotland in search of allies and treasure.

I’ve already played Expeditions: Rome, which is the newest game in this franchise, and I think is massively underrated. Honestly I enjoyed Rome more than Baldurs Gate 3 (I’ve reviewed both games if you want to know why), but as the developers haven’t announced another game yet, I decided to go back and play the older game.

Gameplay

• Combat is turn based and is quite tactical. You’ll have an active party of 6 characters chosen from a squad of around 10-12. Each character has 2 action points to move and attack on their turn.

• Positioning on the hex grid is important. You’ll want to have shield wielders at the front to block enemy movement and protect your archers and healers, while some weapons such as spears have longer reach. Shields will sometimes prevent a character from taking health damage, but can be disabled by axe wielders using a pull move. And some weapons have special abilities, for example I found a spear that could penetrate 2 hexes, so while I had to be careful to avoid friendly fire, if 2 enemies were standing next to each other, I could get a double kill.

• Enemy AI is quite good, they’ll focus attacks on weaker characters, they’ll try to stun you, and they’ll put shield guys in chokepoints to block your movement while their archers hit you from miles away.

• Playing on normal difficulty, I didn’t lose many fights, but the challenge comes from trying to win without any character getting knocked out, because this can give them injuries which cause debuffs in upcoming fights. Injuries can be healed while camping on the world map, but the medicine costs are high and more serious injuries take longer to heal.

• During the camping phase you’ll also need to make sure everybody has enough food and sleep, and you can assign characters to hunt, guard the camp, and craft items.

• The campaign has a time limit, but this wasn’t a problem at all. I finished all the quests with about half of the time remaining.

Story

• Main quest gives you a choice of which faction to support, and many conversations let you choose whether to be peaceful or aggressive.

• Even though it took me 30 hours to complete the campaign, the story felt a bit short. I was expecting some kind of twist leading to another chapter, so I was a bit surprised that the game ended when it did.

• There’s not much voice acting, and the few spoken lines are poor quality.

Technical

• Graphics relating to environment and character models are bad (and probably wouldn’t have been considered good 7 years ago either). I did like the character portraits though.

Recommendation

Expeditions Vikings originally released in 2017, so obviously its biggest flaws when compared to newer games relate to presentation of graphics and voice acting. Thankfully, the tactical combat is fun and the story is decent, so its worth picking up on a sale.

I was pleasantly surprised by this game. The strong storyline really drew me in, and had me role playing as the son of a dead thegn trying to restore his father's territory to greatness. That sounds trite, but, not all game stories are compelling. Some are just a bland pretext to play the mechanics of the game. In this case, the game is the pretext to tell the story, I appreciate that.

Sure, there were a few warts, such as clunky UI components, trying to find the right pixel to loot objects, poor buff and debuff tooltips, quests that can be unintentionally blocked from completion if you discover them in the wrong order, consequences that weren't fully explained before a choice, etc.

But overall, I felt this turn-based tactical combat game really explored the culture and morality of being a viking during their heyday. The story was rich, the choices felt consequential, and the politics felt well thought out.

This wasn't groundbreaking new territory, but the subject matter was fresh, and the story hooked me well enough to get me to put down my other games and play through it, once I got started. That tells me something about how good it was.

Best of the expeditions historical CRPG trilogy in my opinion. The most customisation in regards to what your character can do, and while there is time limit everything you do doesn't feel time-wasting and adds to the overall narrative while giving you just enough time to get everything you want to do done. Enjoyable companions and a historically realistic setting of Charlemagne era Viking exploration of the northern British isles. Nice touches such as unique looking designs for upgrading your companions armour. One complaint is wolves are horrifically over-powered and pack swarms will give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

A more detailed video review can be found here:
If you liked Expeditions: Conquistador, you will definitely like Viking. It got rid of some of the not-so-polished strategy components of its predecessor, and instead chose to focus on the RPG and turn-based tactics aspects, and it's better for it. The writing kept the same charm, while also having more interesting characters to interact with. Sure, the companions are somewhere in-between being stereotypes and characters with depth, but it's still an improvement.
The combat itself is pretty well thought out, in particular when you consider that the skill tree encourages synergies between the abilities of your vikings. The battle arenas are well thought out, which is pretty impressive since they're dynamic and laid out in the place where you make contact with your enemies most of the time. Admittedly, the game's more forgiving than Conquistador, but it's also more satisfying to play, less cheesing necessary.
Despite some of its quirks, it's definitely a RPG worth playing.

A great game brimming with soul. It's a bit buggy and rough on the edges but will always have a special place in my heart.
I also wanted to mention the soundtrack, it's absolutely brilliant. The only way to make it better is to have more tracks.

I just finished this game and I thoroughly enjoyed it. That being said, there are gameplay mechanics and small issues that could lead to some frustration for the unprepared or unwilling.
Bad stuff first. The most annoying thing in this entire game is trying to get the little hand cursor to appear to pick up loot. You will find yourself messing with the camera to poke through barrels and chests constantly.
This game has a time limit. I strongly dislike time limits in my games, but the good news is that I had more than enough time and that was with me going back and forth to Denmark a bunch and generally goofing off. Don’t overdo it with the camping, and you can really stretch the time limit quite a bit.
As for the camera, it simply does not zoom out enough, but other than that, it’s easy enough to move it to your liking.

This is just a minor gripe but one more bit of jank. Sometimes you won’t be able to equip items and you have to leave the inventory menu and come back to resolve it. Not a gamebreaker by any means, but irritating, nonetheless.

The gameplay itself is very good, but I did have to restart as I didn’t quite understand the systems at work with SP and resource management. You want each of your hirdmen to only specialize in one or two weapons. This rule goes for most skills (1 or 2 support skills, etc.) If you attempt to make a jack of all trades, you are going to struggle on medium difficulty or above. When you start acquiring extra hirdmen, make sure you pick one to heal, one to tinker and craft, etc. You will have enough party members to pimp out camp. One more thing I wish I knew when I started, without the use of thralls, you will have a difficult time doing everything you want in your homestead, so it is good to focus on either power or prosperity as opposed to both (I used no thralls for the entire game).

Dialogue options in this game are many and meaningful. You have characters with personality, everything is well written, and the number of dialogue options can be dizzying for somebody who locks up at A or B style questions. The hirdmen’s dialogue is well written and the story is interesting. There are even a few mysteries left that I didn’t uncover…
Now for the meat and potatoes, the battle system. In short, it’s excellent. You will be killed and probably more than once, but once you learn how to use the battlefield and when to deploy traps or use skills, the game becomes a thrill ride. There is an excellent cover system at work here as well, and you can hide units behind hirdmen with shields, as well as obstacles. You are going to want to do this, as archers are DEADLY and can wipe out a party quickly.
In general, you want to utilize cover and deploy skills to limit the accuracy of ranged units. While doing this, you want your sword (or axe) and boards to block access to your archers, healers, etc. utilizing unit placement to also force archers to waste turns on tactical moves. It is all really well done, and once you get the hang of it, it is really fun.
So, yeah, Expeditions: Viking, it’s really good. I’m jumping back into Conquistadors next!