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Even having said all that, we still haven't even talked about the game's real high-points - the awesome battles that cap each chapter. Once you've explored an island and liberated enough of its men it's time to defeat Hel's armies and send them back to the underworld. These battles act as the centrepieces of the game, as Skarin and his chums take on Undead fiends in their thousands, chopping their way through until only one side is left standing. What makes the battles so convincing is not just the scale - we're talking Return of the King, not Chronicles of Narnia - but the way you get a real sense of churn and brawl of melee combat. As Skarin and his enemies are shunted back, they bash into the shields of the troops behind them, and while the battles in a Dynasty Warriors or Ninety Nine Nights have always seemed a little sterile and artificial, here there's real combat going on all around you, with troops on both sides falling and blood, limbs and miscellaneous viscera all over the shop. According to Rogers and O'Connell, each man or mobile rotting corpse on the battlefield has its own guiding AI and its own priorities, giving the action a much more organic and unpredictable feel.

Nor has Viking abandoned Spartan's strategic leanings. The flow of the battle is affected by the targets you confront. See your men being decimated by a hulking giant? Rush in and you can turn the tide in their favour. Find another troop pinned down by arrows? Track down the archers and take them out. Undead shaman will resurrect their fallen comrades, so destroying them is the only way to stem the tide of enemies, while the officers of Hel's legions act as mini-bosses, giving you a sterner challenge than the normal zombie fighting men. Kill them off and you can earn dragon tokens and using these in conjunction with the dragon gem you'll find relatively early on, you can call in winged-lizard airstrikes to flame-grill whole gangs of goons in a thrice. It's epic, hugely cinematic stuff, with each battle culminating in a fierce one-on-one boss encounter that settles the chapter in style.

Can Viking fail? Well, there's potential for the combat, exploration and even the battles to grow repetitive, but the team keep stressing that they've tried to build in a real sense of progression to the game. The battles in particular are always raising the bar, adding more men, more monsters, tougher units and more stages within the fight. The intention is that Viking is always getting tougher, trickier and more spectacular. At the same time, we hopefully won't get any of the huge difficulty spikes that mired Spartan. Even at the end of the 12 to 16 hours of promised gameplay, the difficulty level isn't overpowering, Rogers claims.

We'll have to wait until the end of March before the final verdict, but at the moment Viking looks like a very good game with the potential to be great; a dark horse that now looks like a winner. Maybe I'll end up disappointed, but for now I can't wait to catch up with our friends in the Norse.

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