Dare you step to the fore and forge a grand alliance of Vikings to sweep all before you?

Can you conquer the land and forge a mighty city and a legendary army?

The time has come for your kingdom to be reclaimed and for your legend to rise!

Welcome to the world of Vikings: Age of Warlords a multiplayer online strategy game. You are setup as a warlord of a small Viking city that is much in need of repair. Although your in game persona will not appear directly in the game you are apply to choose from a number of avatar pictures and there are options to send your hero off on missions. Suffice to say you have a nice choice of artwork to represent yourself.

A brief tutorial will get through the basics quick enough and leave you wanting to see your city reclaimed. A fair part of this game is the city itself with forays into sending troops to gather resources, attack other players and help defend your alliances Forts; but more on that later though.

While your avatar doesn’t level in the same way as some your games your city does. It is a lovely little system were certain buildings can only be advanced when others are; for example your barracks and parade square need to be expanded at roughly the same time. This means that the entire city grows in a more natural way and it really will grow. There is a lot of land to be reclaimed both inside and outside of the walls. Farms outside of the city are needed to feed the people inside and you will need troops to clear the bandits from them. Thankfully there are plenty of those to build both food for the troops/people and wood for the construction of buildings.

Joining or creating an alliance is part of the end goal of the game; after all how else will you destroy everyone else? Alliances are very helpful in that members can help speed up each others build times and help in mutual defence. Furthermore you can claim Forts for your alliance, which increases your alliances power and opens up a whole new world of opportunities for attack.

Of course Vikings: Age of Warlords would not be a true Free to Play app without the option advance through it with the application of some real world money. This can be used in several ways, both in order to advance the speed of your buildings and to buy certain equipment or items. Possibly the most important way to this is with a second build queue. While normally only one building can be constructed at a time this allows for a second set of building work to happen simultaneously. Until you start playing the game you can not understand just how quickly this speeds everything up.

While this all sounds very complicated the control layout is all very simple. Everything is clearly laid out and very few things blink or flash at you for your attention. Thankfully upgrading buildings is as easy as click on them to bring up there options, no complicated scrolling through menus to find things. You will find all the things to actually do in game are easy to access and soon will become second nature. The graphics are simple, robust and easy on the eye. Nothing stands out as jarring.

All in all Vikings: Age of Warlords is a good example of how this genre can be done correctly and you will soon find yourself getting deep into the game. After all who else but you should become a legend?