Viking Frontiers a game developed by BLUM Entertainment and Wildlands Interactive. This game was certainly an interesting one for me to play, Viking Frontiers falls into the RPG, Survival, Simulation and Strategy genres. The reason this is interesting is that the Survival simulation genre of games to me are some of the few that I would personally avoid, as I have never been able to enjoy myself when playing them, but that is just my preference when it comes to games. So, when it came to playing this game, I wanted to give it a fair shot without taking my likes and dislikes of games into consideration. After playing the game, I can say that it has changed my mind set on the genre, however this game is not one that people new to the genre should try straight of the bat. This is because the bad aspects of this game outweigh what good this game does do.
Viking Frontiers was first released on the 29th of April 2025 for Steam users. The game would see its way to consoles just over a year later being released on the 9th of July 2026 for both Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. To my knowledge it is not on the Nintendo Switch and there have been no updates regarding there being a version for the Nintendo Switch as of writing this.
Jarl ready for this?
In Viking Frontiers, you play as the son of the clan’s leader, who after political problems has had his Jarl title taken away from him. While out on the water a disaster hits your ships leading you wake up alone on a shore, once you leave the shore that you woke up on (after a small tutorial) you end up finding your father, who is standing by the remains of the ship. He tasks you with ensuring the clans survival. You do this by slowly completing the tasks that he sets you. The big question of the game is this, will you succeed and earn the title of Jarl.
If like me, you are new to games like this then I would highly recommend that you do enable the tutorials as they will help you understand what the game is asking you to do. The reason I say this is I had to refer to the tutorials as there were times I got confused on what my next step was meant to be. I feel that part of the issue for me at least was that the tutorials would be large blocks of text at a time, this felt like there was being too much information provided at once. A straightforward way that this could be resolved would be to break up the chunks of text into smaller sections and have them appear when the player reaches the next task that requires the corresponding information.
These hills are not alive with the sound of music.
From my time playing the game, I was quite surprised to notice the distinct lack of background music; in fact, there was not any playlist of music or songs that I noticed playing. There is a possibility that this could be something that appears later within the game and I have just not encountered it yet. This is not the case, my reason behind thinking this is that there is still a form of sound that does play within the game. Instead of being music it comes in the form of background noise. To be more specific the sounds that you hear are ones I feel as if they have been taken straight out of nature, which for a game like this is the best choice of sound that they could go for. The sound of birds chirping the waves splashing and the sound of the rain falling or the crackle of the campfire are just some of the immersive sounds that you will hear. the reason I feel they have made an excellent choice with the sounds they picked is that they feel natural and will pull you into the world. It helps you feel more alert as you notice all the sounds around you. If they had made the choice to go with a soundtrack, I feel that it would negatively impact of the game, this is because with the style of game and hours of potential game play a soundtrack would become repetitive and in the worst-case situation it could become irritable.
During my gameplay I also noticed that there was an unmistakeable lack of voice acting, now as mentioned already I haven’t played a game like this before so I cannot say if this is the norm for games of this style of is this is a choice that the developers have made for this game. if it is the latter then that is a bad choice on the developer’s part, while I understand that it is expensive to have voice actors it can make all the difference. A way they could have added sound to the conversations could be through grunting sound effects, this would make it clear that there is a conversation going on, as the player reads the text box. Now if this is a normal thing in similar games, I will acknowledge that my criticism is more to the genre than the developer.
Rebuilding the town from sticks and stones.
The mechanics of this game are mostly good; all be it for the few bugs that I did encounter as I played. To do anything in the game you need to gather the materials, so for those who have the tendency to pick up everything in a game that they find then your training will come in use here. Until you unlock the necessary building you will be stuck using stone tools, while not a major issue as sticks and stones are plentiful the basic tools will break a lot leading you to have to make a new one. this means that you will have to always keep an eye on your equipment and how long it has left until it breaks.
Another mechanic in the game is the hunger/thirst/rest, this can be checked up on in the inventory menu. If either one of the three gets to low, then it can lead to the players death. This means that it is vital to have a supply of food and clear water. The former you will have to hunt using a crafted spear and knife, depending on what you hunt. Whereas the later can be collected from a body of water in the waterskin that is provided to you, but before drinking you must boil it on a campfire to turn it into clean drinking water. when the hunger or thirst meters get too low it will trigger voice lines that comment on being hungry or thirsty.
Can you judge a game by looks alone?
The saying you cannot judge a book by its cover is one that I apply to every game that I play, in most cases if a game has a good story, then I can forgive graphics that do not look that good. However, with this game both the graphics and the story were not that good. At multiple different points of the game I had graphical issues, the most common one was that the light would always dip to a low light making it harder to see what is going on. This would always happen around noon in game time.
Overall, this was not an exceptionally good game, from the graphical issues to mechanical ones has left this game with too many issues to count. While these issues are ones that personally make the game unfun for me, I will say that this could be an enjoyable game for people who enjoy survival simulation games. If you enjoy games of this genre then by all means give it a go, just because it is not my cup of tea does not mean it is not worth a go.
