Volgarr the Viking. GAH. Released on PC first, I got to experience this 'gem' on the Xbox One as a free with gold title. Yeah, the game was free on the Xbox One. That should make the game even better! No. It doesn't. Volgarr is a retro style platformer action game, which that is a very popular genre lately. With the likes of the excellent Shovel Knight, this game could have been a nice throwback too right?

Instead, we get a mess of extreme difficulty, stiff controls, and the lack of any real individuality at all. The devs advertised Volgarr the Viking as a throwback to 'when games were tough' using that as their FIRST LINE in the description. This notion of difficulty was taken way too far. The game is like Ghosts n' Goblins in a way. You control Volgarr, running, jumping, and stabbing enemies. You have a sword, a spear throw, and some other abilities to give you 'options' in combat. The combat is one of the few things that works well for the most part, it feels really nice, but that is where the fun ends for me. By default, Volgarr dies in one hit. Yeah, a single hit. As you collect treasure chests, you get Viking equipment that gives you an extra hit each one you collect, but trust me, you won't have these for long. There are no checkpoints within each stage, if you die at any point, you go back to the beginning of the stage. Did you just get to the boss and died really quick? Too bad, you go back to the start of the stage. You want to beat the stage? You have to play it over and over and over and over until you get it just right. Sound fun? To me, it isn't, at all. Even when you get to a boss, they will make sure to have a random spawning enemy or two there just to cheapen the difficult further.

Combining this with the cheap respawning enemies throughout the stages, the insanely stiff jumping controls that are far inferior to Super Mario World on the SNES, and a constant reliance on 'trial and error', it creates a game that I have grown to hate. Not just because it is 'hard', but because it is hard for the wrong reasons. They made this game insanely difficult for the sheer sake of making it insanely difficult. There is no story, no innovation of any kind, no charm, just a generic Viking romp through generic stage after generic stage. It uses it's difficulty as its main selling point and that is a terrible idea. There are many very difficult games out there, Dark Souls is a good modern example, but Dark Souls has difficulty that actually feels fair. Dark Souls gives you choices, it gives you strategy, ways to learn and get better. Volgarr relies more on pure memorization and forcing you to master the very awkward control. Sorry, but to me, retro is not an excuse to make a game control terribly. It is also not a good excuse to make a game unreasonably unfair. This game is retro done terribly wrong. Compared to the wonderful Shovel Knight, this game has no place, except for the most hardcore players in gaming and that is a very small number of gamers. Make no mistake, this game could have been fun, it has the right feel in its combat and if the controls were better, that would work too. All it needed was multiple difficulties for the players like me that just want to enjoy a reasonable challenge, not a montage of masochism as the game is.