Asgard's Fall — Viking Survivors

by Aethyna Apr 30, 2025 | 1 Votes | 99 Played | 0 Reviews

9 rate

Genres:

Action

Graphics:

Labels:

Pixel Art , Survivors-like/Bullet Heaven , Roguelike/roguelite

Platforms:

Publishers:

Assemble Entertainment Choose one of three unique characters as you venture into each of the Nine Nordic realms, battling various creatures and bosses in this unique Survivors-like game, Asgard’s Fall – Viking Survivors. Upgrade your skills and gain critical boosts in the form of warpaints as you progress. Will you be able to emerge victorious? Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Asgard’s Fall – Viking Survivors is the latest entry in the Survivors-like or bullet heaven subgenre, albeit with a fun Viking theme. Choose one of three unique characters as you venture into each of the Nine Nordic realms, battling various creatures and bosses. Upgrade your skills and gain critical boosts in the form of warpaints as you progress. Will you be able to emerge victorious?

Gameplay

Regardless of how familiar you are with Survivors-like in general, Asgard’s Fall immediately plunges you into a game right from the start after choosing a character to play as from the campfire. There’s no tutorial or guide – you’re expected to figure things out yourself as you navigate through the world.

As with most Survivor-like games, the game is designed to make your character feel increasingly more powerful as you progress. This is done in several different ways in this game. For starters, you’ll get to choose up to five unique abilities that will be auto-triggered once their cooldown is up. These abilities are associated with certain elements, be it fire or ice, though there are some abilities that are marked simply as “physical damage”.

Each of these abilities and their subsequent upgrades can be chosen out of three options as part of Yggdrasil’s gift whenever you level up. Sometimes, you may even get legendary, epic, or rare upgrades that can really amp up the ability in question by providing increases of up to 60%. Each ability can only be upgraded up to 10 times, regardless of the type of upgrade you chose. Due to this, you may want to use your precious crystals to reroll your options, in hopes of getting one of those better upgrades, just to make every upgrade slot count.

However, unlike a typical RPG, you don’t just earn experience points passively as you slay your enemies. Instead, you need to grab the experience crystals dropped from your fallen enemies. Thankfully, though, these crystals don’t disappear after some time, so you can always return to them later if there are way too many enemies crowding the place for it to be feasible to collect the crystals there and then.

If you’re lucky, you may also stumble upon a Skull-shaped boost that will draw all the experience crystals that are on the map towards your location. In a way, your character is basically vacuuming the crystals in once you have that boost active. I should also point out that all of this is a pretty standard game mechanism for any Survivors-like game, and if you’re an avid fan of the subgenre, this is not exactly news to you. There’s also another pick-up that you can grab to heal yourself – the golden apple – and these apples appear in the world more frequently than the skull.

Yggdrasil’s gift isn’t the only upgrade you can get whenever you level up – you may get access to the Web of Wyrd as well. In fact, I dare say you get each of these upgrades alternately, meaning that you’ll get a Yggdrasil’s gift for your first level-up and the Web of Wyrd for your second, and so on and so forth.

The Web of Wyrd allows you to create your own build while you’re within a run by placing “knots”. There are three types of knots, namely the knot of echo (multipliers), knot of power (increased stats), and knot of fate (new passive ability). You place these knots into the nodes in the gridded web as you earn them. Similar to the upgrades, you get to choose out of three option and can spend crystals to reroll them if you want. The knots also come in different rarity and grades, with the legendary being the most coveted.

Personally, I think it’s really interesting to design the perfect web here due to how the knots work. The knot of fate, for instance, needs to be surrounded by knots of power that have a total link value that matches the minimum link value it needs to be activated. Naturally, higher grade knots of power will provide more link value, making it much easier to reach the minimum value needed to activate adjacent knots of fate. The multiplier knot, the knot of echo, blocks off a node whenever it is placed, but depending on its rarity, it can provide up to a 150% boost to a specific adjacent node. The boost only really works on knots of power though, since most knots of fate don’t have stats in them to boost.

Aside from abilities and the Web of Wyrd, you will also get to power up your character outside of a map, while you’re in the “lobby” of the game, a.k.a. the camp before heading up the roots of the Yggdrasil. Here, you can invest skill points you’ve earned from your runs into skills that can really change how you play and give you an advantage in your next runs. These skills are permanent, though you do get the option of resetting your points for free so you can reinvest the points again to create a new build.

After clearing the first main boss, the Jörmungandr, in Midgard, you’ll unlock the warpaint hut where you can then try to fit differently-shaped warpaints (runes) into the grids provided. Each warpaint will add precious stats to your character of choice, and similar to ability upgrades, they come in different colors, with the colors indicating their rarity or tier. You can even earn pigments in your playthroughs to craft new warpaint patterns, but those can take a while since you need quite a lot of pigments to craft even the simplest patterns.

There’s even a compendium that helps you figure out which abilities work synergistically with one another. When these two abilities are upgraded to level 5 or above, you’ll then gain a strong Forged Ability to use during your playthrough. I have yet to complete my compendium, but it’s nice to have this since I notice that I tend to mostly stick to only one element for my runs – it just makes sense since you can just stack knots that bolster that specific elemental power to have the bonus apply across all abilities. In a way, the compendium encourages the player to try out new abilities and ability combos.

Despite being in early access, Asgard’s Fall – Viking Survivors has already proved that it is an immensely fun and addictive game, much like the original Vampire Survivors that have coined this subgenre. Progression is both fun and flexible in the sense that the game actually allows you to create your own unique builds both within a run and outside of one. As mentioned earlier, the compendium is also a nice touch, to encourage the player to try different abilities since even the most (perceived-to-be) weak ability can turn into something more devastating with the right combo.

However, the game isn’t fully complete yet. It currently has four out of the nine realms available to play. I also find that despite having different themes for the realms, the enemy designs, especially their attack patterns, are quite similar. This isn’t the case for the boss fights, though – those are super fun to take on and are well-varied.

Graphics/ Sound

If you’re a fan of retro pixel art, you’ll love the visuals in Asgard’s Fall – Viking Survivors! The designers managed to blend the art style with Norse mythology well, featuring sprites and environments that not only oozes old-school charm, but also capture the essence of classic action games. In terms of sound, the game features a selection of Nordic-inspired tunes and sound effects that complement the theme and gameplay well enough.

Conclusion

Asgard’s Fall – Viking Survivors is, without a doubt, a must-play for any fan of the Survivors-like subgenre. Even in its early access stage, the game already has plenty too offer, and what it already has shows the game’s immense promise as the next indie hit. As an avid fan of Survivors-like, even if you haven’t decided to get the game now, due to it being an early access title and all, you definitely want to keep it in view and grab it once it is fully launched.

New Game Added: Asgard's Fall — Viking Survivors

by Aethyna Apr 30, 2025

Choose one of three unique characters as you venture into each of the Nine Nordic realms, battling various creatures and bosses in this unique Survivors-like game, Asgard’s Fall – Viking Survivors. Upgrade your skills and gain critical boosts in the form of warpaints as you progress. Will you be able to emerge victorious?