Viking Frontiers - PS5 Review

The game's title takes up most of the image. To the right is a Viking warrior brandishing a sword.

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Grab your axe and bow, and get ready to fight for survival! Developed by BLUM Entertainment, Viking Frontiers puts you in the role of a surviving member of a Viking clan cast out of their homeland. You’ll need to hunt, build, and raid your way to the top, as you attempt to keep your clan alive.

After its release on Steam last year, Viking Frontiers is now available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Despite the mixed reception received for the PC version, I was nonetheless excited to try this one out!

Survival is Everything in Viking Frontiers… When it Works

Viking Frontiers opens in the most generic way imaginable. A quick text crawl sets the scene: your father has had his Jarl rights stripped from him during a time of political unrest. With your clan chased out of their homeland, you take to the seas in order to escape. As luck would have it, you run into a storm, capsize, and wake up stranded, alone, on a beach.

The player character is whittling wood down to create wooden parts. — I’m not all that outdoorsy, but I’m pretty sure wood doesn’t create sparks…

Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to find other survivors, kicking off a series of quests to start up a new settlement for your surviving clan. The basic premise of the game is that you slowly build up your own village, recruiting new villagers and warriors as you grow. Now, this is where the fun should begin, but unfortunately, Viking Frontiers is borderline unplayable. You start simple, tasked with building some basic shelters for your clan before you construct a workshop to expand your crafting abilities. However, it doesn’t take long for the long list of bugs to kick in…

Menus, Maps, and Maddening Mechanics

Before speaking about bugs, let’s talk about controls. They’re fine in terms of movement and using tools, but everything else, especially navigating menus, isn’t optimised for consoles. Sure, it’s playable, but not without issue. Aside from the fiddly UI, I found myself unable to move briefly after backing out of a menu. The “Inspector Mode” that allows you to scope out nearby resources also doesn’t highlight objects half the time. Oh, and the “Walk Slowly” toggle button assigned to a shoulder button is utterly pointless.

Speaking of the menus, each building has its own sign, in which you can manage the inhabitants or workers of each one. Except it barely works, and is an absolute chore to get going. Assigning tasks to workers is so laborious that you may as well just craft the items yourself! If you do decide to put your peons to work, then it can be difficult to know if they’re even doing what you’ve asked.

A menu showing a steel war axe being crafted. The player has to use various resources in order to craft. — The workers would take 3-5 business days to craft this.

There are no animations to show them working; they just stand idle in their assigned building or bang on the wall with an imaginary hammer. You’ll know they’ve finished a task when you find the requested items inside a chest. That’s it, no notification or audio cue to let you know the job is done. The best thing to do is just sleep for a day; then the workers may have done what you asked.

Navigating the world is a pain as well, as there’s no map. The compass at the top of the screen does highlight key areas, although this doesn’t always show the most important buildings or people. You could argue that being without a map is immersive, but when each area is basically indistinguishable from the next, it can be very easy to lose your way.

When Do I Start Doing Viking Things?

Dodgy controls are bad enough, but Viking Frontiers is buggy to the point of it being broken. The most egregious issue stopped me from being able to progress further into the game. One of the early quests tasked me with building a sawmill. For whatever reason, however, I was unable to place the gathered logs required for the foundation. This softlocked the game and forced me to have to start a new save afresh. Granted, I was only an hour or so into the game, but still very irritating!

The player characters father, Gunnar Stormrider, tasks the player with sending warriors on a raid. — This is all he does… No blinking, no movement. Terrifying.

Honestly, though, if it weren’t for this review, I’d have given up there and then, because it never got any better. The sudden inability to rest meant I had to wait until I died of sleep deprivation, is just one example of how broken the game is. And, as the subheading suggests, at no point between all the restarts, bugs, and general sense of frustration did I ever feel like I was role-playing as a Viking. You’ll occasionally face off against Viking enemies, but most of your time is spent farming or slowly building up your settlement. And I mean slowly literally, as gathering resources and carrying them back to your homestead is painfully slow.

There is no one thing Viking Frontiers does that is better than the countless other survival-type games I’ve played in the past. At no point did I find myself having fun. I don’t mind games that make you perform menial tasks over and over (mundane job simulator games are my guilty pleasure), but there was nothing rewarding about this one.

Graphics & Audio

Certain environments look fine, whilst others — usually rocky areas — look low poly. It’s a strange contrast in styles that actually is probably just a lack of effort on the developer’s part. Then, there are the plethora of graphical issues. During my time with the game, I came across several issues that I could not figure out how to fix. Chests, beds, resources, and countless other objects would become invisible, making it impossible to find certain items. Weapons have awful ghosting effects when swinging them, with the overall animations being generally poor.

The player inside their home. A pop-up box states they are looking at a single bed, although the bed is invisible thanks to a glitch. — That looks… comfy?

When it comes to the audio… well, there isn’t that much of it! There are the basic chopping and mining sounds when collecting resources, but the rest of the game is eerily quiet. Characters are entirely mute, and there’s no background music. I hope you like listening to birds chirping, because that’s the majority of what you’ll hear in Viking Frontiers!

Longevity

If you can get past the numerous bugs, glitches, and unintuitive UI, then Viking Frontiers has plenty of content. It’s just a shame that the numerous issues plaguing it made such a drag to play. There’s lots of research to unlock, done by spending money that you collect daily from your villagers, and a tonne of skills to level up.

But when there’s a chance that you might be softlocked from progressing or lose access to your bed, is it even worth putting all that effort in?

Final Thoughts

Honestly, Viking Frontiers is an unfinished game that should never have made its way to consoles. I have a soft spot for other games of its ilk, such as Bellwright and Sengoku Dynasty. But this is one I absolutely cannot recommend this. There are countless games in the survival genre worthy of your time, but Viking Frontiers is not one of them.

As much as it pains me to say this, Viking Simulator, unfortunately, is getting the ThumbCulture Broken Award.