NORSE: Oath of Blood initially caught my eye due to the way it presented its story telling wrapped in a turn-based tactical game. I do enjoy games like XCOM, and I really enjoy the Norse Viking age of that Scandinavian era. Wrap that together with warband and settlement/stronghold management gameplay and I was in. Additionally, it was promising something games like XCOM don’t usually offer, a cinematic focused story. Guiding the player through more of a linear story path than a branching one.

This is actually a follow up to a prequel short story that was also written by Giles Kristian called Sword Brothers. Giles had a Viking novel, God of Vengeance, that was a Times Book of the Year as well. Needless to say, there are expectations for good writing and characters. It turns out, NORSE: Oath of Blood may be a bit unoriginal in its main plot, but its presentation is actually great. The story telling itself is well done, but it is something we have seen plenty of times before. You play as Gunnar whose father is Jarl Gripr and he is betrayed by his close ally Steinarr Far-Spear. You escape only with your sister Sigrid and Arn, your families main protector. Exiled, Gunnar must build a settlement, form strategic alliances, and lead a warband to avenge his father.

We will see you again in Valhalla, father.

As I mentioned above, the story itself isn’t all that original, but I was pulled in by the presentation and the characters. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish the game due to a litany of bugs and fatal game crashes. I got, from what I was able to gather online, about halfway through the game. After my third hard crash, and insane amount of bugs, I had to call it. It really is a shame because I wanted to experience more of the story since there is something good here with the story and gameplay, which I do want to speak on still at least. Hopefully there will be patches so I can return to it and so any new players can enjoy it as well.

NORSE: Oath of Blood is a tactical turn-based game with settlement management gameplay. Since this is set in the Viking age expect mostly melee combat with swords, daggers, axes, hammers, polearms etc. For ranged weapons there are bows, spears, hatchets, as well as utility items like nets. I’m going to try and stay away from definitive statements about the depth of the gameplay since I was not able to level up all the characters attributes because the game just didn’t want me to. However, from what I did get to experience, each type of character played a very important part to the fights. Not only individually important, but how they fight together was great also.

Executions are not only cool kill moves, but they also refill your action points.

Each character has a roll on the battlefield so loadouts and choosing the right upgrade for that character and how you want them to play is key. Each time you level up there will be two different skills to choose from and each archetype will mostly have different skill. Characters with the Shield Bash skill can push an enemy into an adjacent ally and they will do a combo attack on the enemy. Shield Bash also is used to push into fire and other environmental effects like having enemies slip in mud. One of my favorites is a taunt that gets an enemy to rush at you to engage on a one-on-one. This pulls them into dangerous positions, for them.

I did enjoy the gameplay from about the half I got to play. However, it did seem a bit easy from an AI intelligence standpoint. The enemies just seem dumb, they weren’t setting up any good flanks or attacks. They would often run around aimlessly and waste a turn or just skip their turn entirely seemingly for no reason. I’m not sure if thing get tougher in the late game, but an XCOM this is not.

Strategic character placement didn’t seem all that important. Place archer behind big guys and go.

As for the settlement management aspects, this was a bit of a letdown. Here is where you get to build up your empire, open up trade, recruit, craft, have random encounters, and all of that. Unfortunately, it just feels a bit half  baked. As I mentioned before, NORSE: Oath of Blood is a linear story game and it’s never more prevalent than in this portion here. I figured maybe once we got to this aspect of the gameplay it would open up some freedom and let me have some trail and error. Figure out how much I should spend versus reserve for tomorrow. Maybe need to save scum a bit, I don’t know. Nope, this is just as much linear on the rails as any story quest in the game.

What I mean is, there is no way to just go forage for food or resources of any kind without there being a prompt or mission to do so. You will have people in your settlement that will bring in a set amount of resources per day. You will need to build the right structures in order to have someone working there to bring in fish, hunt, trade, have a blacksmith, a seamstress to craft armor, and housing for everyone. The problem is, all of this is done linearly so there is no right or wrong, it’s just build what the game tells you to build when it wants you to build it. However, I can see where some players would like that a more streamlined settlement feature.

I do wish there was more depth in the settlement management system.

I would be able to get over the fact I wasn’t impressed with the AI or the base building, maybe I should have put it on hard mode, but what I can’t get over is the broken state NORSE: Oath of Blood is in. It got to the point I was jotting down notes of all the bugs I was running into because there were just so many. Some are small, like my characters just being completely bald during combat. Or, them having on the starting clothes from the opening of the game and not the new armor I had equipped. There were plenty of funny ones like where I’ve pushed enemies into fires and they did that weird nonstop death roll animation.

Bugs like if you kill an enemy with a move that puts them in a status like Crippled, they will die, but they will be stuck in the animation of being crippled and you won’t be able to use that tile. That’s annoying for sure, but you can work around that. However, I ran into multiple times where an enemy would some how join one of my allies on the same tile and there would be no way to attack the enemy without also hitting my ally. That was quite frustrating, to say the least. Couple all of these bugs with three critical error crashes, and you can understand my frustrations.

Nothing like getting stuck in the ground!

Let’s get back to some positives. Visually, I was impressed by the character models and the overall quality of the environments. There are definitely some needed performance patches because I was bouncing all over the place with my framerate, but only while exploring the lush forest areas. During combat it was fine, as there isn’t much going on, obviously. There are some texture pop-in bugs where textures will take a while to load or sometimes not load like in the case of my character’s hair. However, overall, the visual presentation and animation work I felt was really nice especially for a tactical turn-base game like this.

Sound design is also a positive with good voice acting all around. I was very impressed by the voice acting, not only from the main cast, but from the side characters as well. Each character was well delivered and portrayed. General sound effects are good, from the clashing of the swords and armor, to the thwips of the bows. The soundtrack, while fun, sometimes falls into that newer interpretation of Nordic/Viking throat singing instead of their melodical folk style, but it is still solid.

Unfortunately, despite me really wanting to like and recommend NORSE: Oath of Blood, it seemed to fight me at every turn. There is something here that I hope will eventually be great. Perhaps in a few more months after a handful of patches this can be something good, because the foundation is there. Combat is fun, and there is a nice variety of moves and combinations with the attacks. While I would like a bit more freedom with the base building, I can see how a more streamlined version would appeal to some. However, none of this can shine in the state it is currently in.

NORSE: Oath of Blood is available now on PC and later on Consoles.

Reviewed on PC with i7-12700kf, RTX 5070, and 32gb DDR5 RAM.

A copy of NORSE: Oath of Blood was provided by the publisher.