Saga : Rage of the Vikings
Mega Cruel Game #9
Type of Game
An attempt to release an RTS, long after everyone else, and far inferior to everyone else's.
Release date on our machines
May 1999, but take this with a grain of salt, since absolutely NO ONE gives a damn about this game.
Developer
Cryo Interactive Entertainment: a few hits like Dragon Lore and MegaRace, but also a lot of junk.
Publisher
Cryo Interactive Entertainment, whose very name already suggested shoddy work back then, and which eventually ended up being absorbed by Microïds.
Saga: Rage of the Vikings: Available on... Ugh. I was hoping to find it on GOG.com and Steam, but even there, nobody wanted it.
I don’t remember exactly how, but I had installed this game on my computer. Obviously, you had to install it to play it. I think I really wanted this one. It didn’t just fall out of the sky like Rayman and Wing Commander IV before it. I asked for it, or I bought it myself after washing the car twenty times, lured by the promise of seeing what this famous Viking fury looked like on screen. Back then, I had a pretty serious addiction to RTS games. Meaning my goal was to devour as many as possible, as fast as possible. Total Annihilation still held me just as tightly in its enormous steel arms, and Age of Empires was still sending me a few reminders in the form of ballista projectiles. But the prospect of trying out one more—even though I’d already set Dark Reign aside—well, that actually appealed to me quite a bit. In the end, I launched Rage of the Vikings about ten times in total. And even then, I stuck with it because I really wanted to dive into it, and it would have been a lot of money down the drain if I’d given up. In fact, I didn’t understand a thing; for the first time in a strategy game, I found myself stuck because I didn’t even know how to develop my village, harvest a certain resource, or recruit some idiot in armor.
Blockade of the Vikings
Every single one of them, without exception, raved about this underrated strategy gem—how it had been a staple of their childhood and brought joy to their days. Not a single one complained about the bugs, the lack of available information, the features that didn’t work, and, um… the thousand other issues that plagued the game. Had I missed something back then? It’s impossible that so many people loved Saga: Rage of the Vikings without me catching on to what made it so charming. I’ll readily admit I’ve never been very good at any game, but I still knew which way to go! Why was my brain drawing a blank here? It wasn’t just because I was becoming a preteen with my head in the clouds. This calls for a little investigation!
Rage of the… euh, everything
Well, if you look a little beyond the YouTube comments, you’ll see that a ton of people also hated this Saga Rage Thing. People like that just don’t comment on the game videos they hate; they don’t go around spewing their rage everywhere so that as many people as possible will notice that they really, really didn’t like that ultra-feminist movie or that album pandering to the woke crowd. Oh yeah, that’s often how it goes—deal with it, right-wingers. In the case of Rage of the Vikings, you didn’t whine too much, and for that alone, you deserve a shout-out. But please apply that same logic to all works of art. Unless, of course, you felt nothing but a deep indifference toward it—which would make perfect sense to me. As I dove back into it a bit, I quickly understood why. A cluttered interface to the nth degree, graphics that were ultra-outdated even back then, pitiful backgrounds that have nothing Viking, Celtic, or otherwise about them, pathetic animations, a completely bizarre pace, incomprehensible combat, and unit reactions that are utterly ridiculous.
Oh yeah, this is a real masterclass in strategy! Doing everything worse than War Wind—what a feat. Seriously, though, when you have to restart the same mission a hundred times because your soldiers destroy a building the moment it comes into view—even though the objective is to loot it without damaging it—all because you don’t have time to click the right button on that poorly designed menu before your army burns down the warehouse in question… it’s enough to drive you nuts. Add to that a nonexistent campaign—meaning no overarching storyline, nor interconnected missions that form a cohesive whole—just simple maps with objectives that are sometimes impossible to achieve. For example: defeating an army with a single warrior, because the other units are stranded on an island, and there’s no way to build or capture a boat. Actually, I’d be willing to go back in time—but just to ditch this lousy game much faster than the first time. What a nightmare this thing is! Why did I want to like it so much?
Well, just because. I sometimes hung out with people who weren’t exactly the best company—whether they were real or from video games (but honestly, mostly from video games). Who hasn’t pushed a poorly made game a little too far during childhood? Who can claim to have loved only the legendary masterpieces of the tenth art before puberty? Almost everyone and almost no one, respectively. There you go. Rage of the Vikings is one of those mistakes I’ve embraced, despite its flaws. Not embraced a lot, but still enough that I have to justify myself. Well, and then, you have to admit that amid all this mess, good ideas do manage to pop up now and then—occasionally, when the bugs and broken mechanics allow it. For starters, all the playable races have both male and female representatives—something rare enough to be worth pointing out in the ultra-masculine world of RTS games. Yeah, uh… even here, we can’t escape the sexist clichés that govern our society—and that of virtual Vikings who aren’t quite polished enough.
So, men are called warriors, while women… are still categorized as women. Yet they have access to the same activities: building, gathering resources, fighting—and also reproducing! Well, it depends on the faction, actually. Does anyone really want the details? Nah, I don’t think so. Alright, let’s move on. Reproduction—now that’s an interesting feature: sending a guy and a girl into a house for a few minutes only to see them come out as a trio instead of a duo. One handy detail: the offspring don’t appear as children, but as fully-formed, educated adults. This isn’t The Sims, after all. But it’s a change from the “create unit” button. So, apparently you can have individuals of different species reproduce—like a human with a dwarf, an elf with a troll, that sort of thing. So, apparently you can have individuals of different species reproduce—like a human with a dwarf, an elf with a troll, that sort of thing.
I never saw anything like that back when I was playing, but by the name of a rainbow-bearded leprechaun, that would’ve scared me. What’s the police doing? Fortunately, it doesn’t bring hybrid monstrosities to life, but simply a representative of one species or the other, chosen at random. But is that really any better? No idea. Starting construction on a building sends people out to chop wood for… well, for the framework, beams, and planks, all that stuff. It doesn’t help the game’s overall flow, but it makes it more believable—a quality this game really needs. A seasonal cycle (summer/winter—let’s not get carried away) doesn’t change much, except that the landscape turns white and the water freezes when it’s cold. And even then, only along the edges of the beaches—I don’t think I’ve seen any other parameters change. Finally, the asymmetry between the different playable races—not only in terms of their physical characteristics but also their skills—is a nice touch.
For example, dwarves can mine metal from the mountains. So if you’re not playing as a dwarf, you have to trade with them to get that precious ore. Too bad I never figured out how to do that back in the Windows 98 days. It’s also a shame that in half the missions, you’re asked to spend metal, yet not a single dwarf to interact with shows up—not even the tip of their big beard. Who are they kidding? Did the developers test their project for more than ten minutes, or what? Between this game that explains nothing and today’s apps where you’re guided by the hand without ever being let go, there are plenty of nice nuances to be found, right? I thought I saw a building that lets you recruit units from other factions in some videos. Only women, though—men aren’t for sale in Saga: Rage of the Vikings. That’s it.
What's the point? To have a giant and a centaur make babies? Uuuh, how awful. Nah, but hiring a dwarf or two to supply us with metal—that’s fine! Among the other mechanics I managed to pick up on from gameplay reviews by some very enthusiastic people (there aren’t many), I’ll highlight “honor,” which is used to subdue enemies when their honor value is lower than ours. Note that killing a woman—or a female of any race—lowers your honor, but killing men doesn’t. Women are meant to be protected and pampered—didn’t you know that? I’ve vaguely read here and there that certain units can reach the rank of druid, granting them access to magic. But I haven’t seen anything about this on YouTube, let alone in my own experience. Wow, three different units per faction! Man, woman, and druid. Keep in mind that men and women just have different skins but function exactly the same way.
And then, those who read this text without dying of boredom may have noticed the presence of various playable races. Seven in total, with gameplay variations that are sometimes notable, sometimes feeling like major penalties thrown right in your face—just because. I never managed to play as all of them during my adventures back then; between bugged maps, ineffective bases, and missions that were impossible to complete, I barely caught a glimpse of the tip of a troll hut or an elf tree. I especially note that, in fact, only centaurs allow their women to fight—and not all playable nations, as I had believed. Women? Centauresses? Females? Mare-centaurs? Man, I have no idea. In any case, the game isn’t all that progressive in the end. An epic about Vikings, though… honestly, it was the perfect opportunity to design female warriors. Oh well. Sure, it wouldn’t have boosted sales—we can’t argue with that. But that clearly wouldn’t have been the problem.
Bangers of the Vikings
The soundtrack is by a guy named Robert Basarte. I haven’t found much info on him, other than that he worked on the movie Le Boulet with Benoît Poelvoorde, and that he played a bit with the band Pigalle. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, poor guy! Still, whatever bit of that Nordic/Viking/bitterly cold, hostile atmosphere you can find in Saga Something is thanks to him. Without Robert, there’d be zero immersion, zero identity—which isn’t surprising, given how terrible the graphics are and the cosmic emptiness of the desolate plains you traverse. Whether we’re switching between slightly tortured rock, cheerful flute melodies, or even some more electronic stuff, well, it almost feels like we’re in the middle of a fjord, smashing our enemies with an axe, shirtless in minus ten degrees. As long as we don’t look at the screen, that is. Here’s at least one person who figured out how to make a game appealing, for crying out loud. Send Robert Basarte off to procreate in a house with an elf or a troll—whatever—as long as you can turn their offspring into developers capable of producing a better-balanced Rage of the Vikings, free of its biggest bugs, featuring real single-player campaigns… and so on. Yeah, I know—usually when a game flops, it’s rarely the fault of the people who were actually working on it. Stay strong, and know you have our support during this tough time. Well, this period is long over, but retroactive support, you know. No, but seriously, just listen to this! If the gameplay were even half as good as this track, it would have easily blown Age of Empires II's sales out of the water.
Garbage of the Vikings
I imagine no one would dispute the fact that this game feels like an unfinished demo—a half-baked project that would have needed several more months of development to carve out a niche in the saturated RTS market of the late ’90s. It seems to me that Cryo Studios knew a thing or two about unfinished projects before it went out of business in 2002. The proof is that there was even a tab in the menu offering updates to add content and fix bugs. But to do that, you had to go to some obscure website and download stuff. I never dared to click that button—that kind of thing scared me way too much. I was convinced it would never work, and that it would flood my stepdad’s computer with viruses. Of course, my stepdad kept insisting that if his computers crashed, it was definitely my video games’ fault. He really had me fooled with that ridiculous argument, the bastard. I was also afraid it would use up our entire data plan, or that if the connection cut out in the middle of a download, it would ruin the game forever. I wasn’t exactly the bravest kid, even when it came to computers. Even when the AI was giving me a hard time in Warcraft III, I was too scared to say mean things to it. On the other hand, sending the fascists swarming all over League of Legends to eat their dead—that’s fine, not too hard to do. Still, if I’d taken the time to study the concept behind Rage of the Vikings to learn how to master its subtleties (read: work around the glitches), I probably would’ve had a great time. And I would have played less Starcraft or Total Annihilation, though.
And who knows, maybe that famous menu that sent us online to improve the game actually worked! And that’s where the rave reviews I’ve read would come from: from people who had the courage to click that famous button. I’m not sure many of my friends would have joined me on the Rage of the Vikings adventure. Did I even dare mention this game to anyone? I don’t think so. Back in 1999, there were a thousand and one more interesting things to do than to rack my brain over a project coded with tar-coated, feathered elbows. Too bad, because the lore, the number of different factions, and their possible interactions—that could have been appealing. Luckily, a certain Heroes III came along to bring some order to all that a few months later… by getting me hooked on turn-based strategy instead of real-time. Talk about an evolution.
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