Okay, we're not going to do the usual horny helmet gags. Or mention looting and pillaging, or braided moustaches. The Vikings have been stereotyped for too long. Their needs, hopes and dreams were much the same as ours. All they wanted in life was a comely wife and a roof over their heads. Or was it someone else's comely wife, after they've lobbed his head over the roof? One or the other.

Viking: Battle for Asgard is a predictably blood-soaked action RPG. The role-playing elements are lightweight; there's no messing around with inventories or fiddling with stats here. Gold is scattered throughout the land, and can be gathered and spent on health potions, runes that power up your weapons, and special moves which can be learnt. And that's about your lot. Viking is really all about the combat.

It's venomously hack-and-slash. Stabbing just a pair of buttons as basic controls, you slice and dice through the opposition, a whirling-bladed tornado of death aided by the game's semi-automatic targeting system (just pressing an attack and the vague direction of an enemy will land a precision strike). On killing blows made with your power attack, Viking goes into slow motion as the enemy gets skewered, decapitated, or indeed both.

There are more complex moves, including dodging and some simple combos, but even these are fairly intuitive. Boss style monsters need special moves to finish them off, executed by mashing various buttons like mad, but these aren't tricky either, as the colour of the button you should be tapping is flashed up on the screen.

The combat flows smoothly, but the downside of the automated targeting help is that it makes the action feel a little artificial at times. And there's the odd camera issue, particularly when fighting in confined spaces. Still, the occasional camera cock-up is pretty much a given in a third-person action game.

Viking doesn't just do small-scale combat, as there are also epic battles to experience. These are tied into the storyline, which involves the Goddess Hel raising an army of undead marauders that you have to vanquish. Often quests involve freeing allied warriors, and when you've recruited enough of an army you can tackle a battle location.

These mass melées are chaotic, but good fun, although at times it's questionable how much influence you actually have on the battlefield. During one skirmish we larked around at the back picking our toenails just to test what would happen, and indeed our forces triumphed regardless of our inaction.

A special mention must be given to the graphics and particularly the sound. The environments are smartly rendered, the blood-shedding animations are excellent, but the 5.1 surround sound tops it all off, particularly the ambient noises. The howling wind at the top of a mountain is chilling, and when you enter a dungeon, all the background noises die down and it goes eerily quiet. There are some really thoughtful touches here.

More hardened role-playing types may argue that Viking's too dumbed down, but we were impressed with the highly intuitive controls and easy flowing combat. There's some great limb-rending fun to be had here, even if it does err on the simplistic side.

Viking is an accessible and intuitive hack-and-slash with a light dusting of role-playing. It's obviously aimed at the more casual RPG fan, and some will find it too undemanding, but we rather enjoyed the carnage-ridden ride.