Hello everybody. Today I'm taking a break from my story to review some more iOS games. Chapter 10 will be up sometime next Sunday.
This game is called The Last Vikings. It's currently my favorite iOS game and the game I play the most frequently. The story is that during the great Viking era where Vikings were unchallenged and extremely powerful, the empire unexpectedly fell for no reason. Eric, one of the last Vikings vows to find out why the Viking empire fell and to bring it back to its former glory. You are Eric, the leader of the last Vikings. The game centers around 2 forms of combat, and managing your Viking camp.
There are 6 areas in the Viking camp. The first area is a treasure hoard where you keep all of your loot and money. The second area has options and credits in it as well as the tunnel of time. In the third area you manage your weapons, Vikings, and heroes. There's a camp in the fourth are with a bonfire where most of your Vikings gather and oftentimes a merchant will sell special deals there. The fifth area is the boatyard where you can build new longboats for your Vikings, and the sixth area is the port where your longboat waits to be boarded to go on some nice raids. Loot consists of materials like wood, cloth, nails, and rope, and money such as gold and hack silver. You use materials to build everything and often gold along with it. The second area is nothing special really just credits and options, except for the time tunnel. You can click on it to get a humorous explanation from a pixelated version of the games creator that the tunnel of time can be used to watch ads from "the future" in order to gain some extra materials or stamina. At first this sounds very bad but all the ads are only 30 seconds long and even though they give a decent amount of loot, they aren't really worth it. The game never ever forces to watch an add it's always a choice and watching two 30 second adds will quickly bring your stamina for raids back up to full. All in all its probably the best way I've ever seen a game developer handle putting adds in his game.
The third area is probably the most interesting because that's where you manage most your camp. As you go on raids you can randomly get different weapons that automatically go to this area in your camp. You can equip 4 weapons, each one with different stats in the 3 categories, damage, evade, and critical. You generally want to equip one kind of shield because they are for the most part the only weapons that have anything in the evade category. After your shield it's probably best just to use your three most powerful weapons, making sure they have the highest total stats, but are also diverse from each other. It also might be a good idea to have a bow, even though I don't think there's a tactical advantage. Now you can imagine that on some of these raids some Vikings are gonna die so this is also where you can hire new recruits that automatically become Vikings romanizing around in your camp. On raids you often get recruits that balance out how many you lose, this is just backup system with each recruit only costing 50 gold each (a low price.) The last thing you can do there is manage your heroes. Hero's are powerful units that fight for the Viking cause. Not all of them are actual Vikings, but they are all powerful made-up or mythical Heroes from ancient times that are fighting on your side. Heroes have their own damage, evade, and critical stats that affect your raids.
The fourth area is nothing special it's just a campfire where most of your Vikings will wander around. Every Viking you have will be wandering around somewhere in the 6 areas in your camp, besides the heroes. Occasionally a merchant will appear in this area offering special deals for heroes or weapons, and sometimes giving you free loot. Most often you buy these deals with hack silver. Hack silver is a currency that is much much rarer than gold and you can use it to buy much more powerful things. You can get it randomly on raids, by finding a strange hay creature and a little girl on some raid locations (don't ask, I don't know either), or by playing every day to get your daily reward. Let's move on to the fifth area, the boatyard. Every 5 raid locations you get the option to buy a new longboat that looks different. Each new longboat can also be upgraded to add one more boat seat then the last. When you unlock these boats you still have to pay for it with gold and materials. When you buy a boat it starts off with only one seat for one Viking, you have to upgrade it to add one more seat each time and every new ship can be upgraded farther before it reaches its max allotment.
The sixth area is simply the area you use to being your raids so let's begin an explanation of those. You have 5 raid options. The first is PVP where you can raid another player's stash of loot. The second is a weekly event world-wide you can participate in to earn rewards. The third is just receiving your daily reward. The fourth option sails you to Barry the Zombie Ship. Barry the Zombie ship is a large talking zombie dragon figurehead on a ghostly ship filled with dead Vikings. He throws up three chests into the ocean that you can open with rising amounts of hack silver accordingly. One gives you materials, one gold, and the last gives you a random rare weapon or hero you would normally have to get on a raid.
The last raid option is the main game. Clicking on it reveals a map of locations strung along a route. As you progress in the game more and more locations reveal themselves on the route. Locations with sharp corners on them are outposts that you can start your sea raids from, circular locations have a defense totem on them that don't permit you to start from. When you are sailing in the ocean to a location you can tap and hold the row button at the bottom of the screen to send a bar going back and forth, you can release the row button on different different colored sections to do different things. There are three degrees of speed sections to land on, an orange section that gives you more ammo, and a purple section that activates your hero's special power. After you release the row button to activate a section you can hold it again to get another, rinse and repeat. Your hero sits at the front of the longboat and each one has special powers, some of which help with these ocean raids. Now speed is obviously important to get to your location as fast as possible, but you'll need to frequently pick up ammo to shoot down objects people are catapulting towards your ship from the beaches. If anything hits your ship, no matter what it is, fireballs from dragons, rocks, arrows, chickens, it will kill a Viking on your ship. Your hero is always killed last and if it is then you lose and Odin destroys one of your locations so you have to retake it. To survive always use the fire button to shoot down objects before they hit your ship. When you pass a location in your ship you hit attack to land there. If it's a new location the villagers will hide behind a barrier that you have to damage, doing damage based on your hero and weapons, multiplied by how many Vikings you have left on your ship. Whether there's a barrier or not you get gold, materials, and either recruits or a weapon from these raids.
Once you've destroyed a barrier at a location you can fight a battle on land. You don't have to sail there to do it and from a siege tower you lead a small army of your Vikings lead by heroes. You can upgrade the tower to increase your Vikings combat stats, the amount of Vikings your bring, and the amount of heroes you can bring. There are 6 waves of enemies, the last one is a boss. While you're traveling between waves you stop a bar at the top of the screen on certain sections that will increase that combat stat, the same way you row during a sea raid. After all 6 waves if you're still alive you get your rewards and loot.
That's my favorite game, The Last Vikings. The story leaves a little something to be desired but that's common in iOS games, still better than many others, and it could be added on in future updates. You can also expect continuing updates because it's a new, active game. The pixel art is INCREDIBLE, the best I've ever seen in an iOS game and that with the amazing gameplay more than makes up for the lack of substantial story. I recommend picking up The Last Vikings right now on the App Store. Bye.
- By Ashton
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