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Lost Viking mixes Threes! style swiping and RPG combat on iPad and iPhone - but is it worth your time?

Horns of plenty

Lost Viking mixes Threes! style swiping and RPG combat on iPad and iPhone - but is it worth your time?
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iOS
| Lost Viking

Lost Viking is a puzzling scrapper with a twist. Rather than playing a game of match-three to make the titular wandering scandinavian warrior smash things in the face, you're playing fa variation of the Threes! formula.

So you're sliding tiles around a grid. But instead of numbers they're marked with symbols. There's a sword, a shield, a lump of meat, and a coin. Sliding tiles with the same symbol into each other joins them together.

The more tiles you add together, the higher the number displayed.

You get a finite number of moves each turn, and once you've used them up the tile with the highest score is played against your foe.

Sometimes you're fighting terrifying ogre beasts, and the highest sword tile is used. Other time you're facing off against charging sheep and you need to use the shield tiles.

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Meat heals you at camp fires, and keys unlock the chests that you stumble across. It's an interesting mechanic, but it's occasionally pretty frustrating.

Your swipes aren't always registered right, and when you've got a small number of moves to score as highly as possibly, that can be incredibly annoying.

You're also punished severely if you can't make a move, which can turn a decent run into a teeth grinding tragedy in about 12 seconds.

There's fun to be had here, especially if you like sliding things around, and it's highly polished as well. It's just a shame the entertainment is often tempered by bouts of anger.

You can grab Lost Viking from the App Store right now for £1.99 / $2.99, and if you like sliding tiles and horned helmets, you'll probably have a decent time.

Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.