Vikings - Wolves of Midgard

The pitch

Vikings - Wolves of Midgard puts you in charge of a Jarl whose clan has just been slaughtered by the Jotan, and sends you out into the Shores of Midgard to rebuild strength, raid enemy camps and fight your way toward the beasts of Ragnarok, all under the encroaching cold of Fimbulwinter -- an eternal winter that functions as both setting and mechanical pressure, since the world itself is actively trying to kill you. It's an isometric action RPG in the Diablo tradition: click or aim to attack, loot gear off fallen enemies, spend skill points across trees tied to Norse gods, and use your home village as a hub to upgrade equipment between raids. Developed by Games Farm and published by Kalypso Media, it launched as a full release on 24 March 2017, with no Early Access period.

A genuinely even split

Vikings - Wolves of Midgard sits at Mixed on Steam -- 59% positive of 1,370 English-language reviews, matched almost exactly by the all-languages total. That's a meaningfully more even split than most games in this review's coverage, and reading a hundred reviews on each side confirms it's a real disagreement rather than statistical noise. The positive side isn't shy about the game's limits, either: several thumbs-up reviews explicitly warn readers not to expect a deep, complex ARPG, framing Wolves of Midgard instead as a shorter, more arcade-like hack-and-slash that succeeds specifically by not overstaying its welcome. "If you want to play deep and complex hack and slash action RPG you need look elsewhere," reads one recommendation -- itself a useful signpost for who the game is actually for.

The negative side converges on specific, recurring complaints rather than a vague sense of disappointment. Class and build customisation gets called "surface deep" by multiple reviewers across different years, a common complaint against a genre where character-building depth is often the main draw. More pointed is the New Game+ system: completing the campaign once and starting a second playthrough strips most of your accumulated gear and progress, keeping only the skill tree, which several reviewers describe as the moment they stopped enjoying the game rather than a minor annoyance. And a specific early-game difficulty spike -- a boss fight in the game's second level -- gets named directly, by reviewers years apart, as disproportionately punishing relative to everything else in the opening hours, the kind of specific, repeated detail that suggests a real balance problem rather than a skill issue.

What's actually good, according to both sides

It would be a mistake to read Vikings - Wolves of Midgard as simply broken, because the things reviewers praise are consistent and specific too. The Norse art direction and setting -- snow-swept villages, brutal Jotan enemies, a genuinely oppressive sense of an ending world -- draws praise even from reviewers who don't recommend the game overall. Combat feels smooth and satisfying for a meaningful stretch of the campaign, particularly with a controller; several reviewers explicitly recommend switching off mouse and keyboard, calling the dodge-roll timing built more for a gamepad. And local, split-screen couch co-op is the one element that shows up as a strength across nearly every era of reviews, from launch year through 2020 -- a genre where good local co-op is genuinely uncommon, and reviewers treat it as the game's clearest reason to own it on a sale.

The part that's specific to reviewing it nine years later

What separates this review from a 2017 one is the second layer of complaint that's built up since: abandonment. A January 2018 review states plainly that there had been no update since September 2017 -- six months after launch -- and asks whether the developer plans to continue support at all. Reviews from 2020 report online co-op broken for over a week with an explicit statement from the developer that no further content or bugfixes were planned. And a 2024 review reports the game no longer working properly on Windows 11, with no developer response. None of this shows up in the achievement or gameplay balance discussion -- it's a separate, later-arriving failure mode, and it matters specifically for anyone considering the game today rather than at launch: the online half of its co-op offering is not something a 2026 buyer can rely on, going by the review record, even though local split-screen co-op appears to have kept working.

Value

At NZ$44.99 with no discount active at the time of checking, Vikings - Wolves of Midgard is priced close to what it launched at nine years ago, which several reviewers -- including positive ones -- called too high even in 2017. A shorter campaign, shallow build variety, a punishing New Game+ and a genre now stacked with better-regarded, better-supported alternatives (Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Diablo III and IV among them) make full price a hard sell in 2026. The clearest value case left is the local co-op experience specifically, which is durable in a way the single-player build variety and the online mode are not, and is best picked up on whatever discount eventually appears rather than at list price.

Verdict

Vikings - Wolves of Midgard earns its Mixed reputation honestly: real strengths in art direction, setting and short-form combat satisfaction, sitting next to real, specific, widely-repeated weaknesses in build depth, difficulty balance and a New Game+ system several reviewers call actively punishing. Nine years on, that debate hasn't really moved -- what's changed is a second, separate story about a developer who went quiet within months of launch and an online mode reviews describe as unreliable for years running. If Wanderer's own approach to progression tells you anything about what we value, it's that a system respecting the time players already invested matters more than raw difficulty -- and that's precisely the piece of Wolves of Midgard's design its own fans keep asking it to fix.