Race To The Nidhogg

Have you ever wanted to have a sword fight with your friends and then feed yourself to a giant murder worm? Well Nidhogg has all that and more.

Like most of the games I own on Steam, I picked up Nidhogg during a Steam sale for a seriously reduced price and I assumed it would end up in the increasingly larger and larger pile of quality games I own and will most likely never play. Until, on a whim, I loaded it up and what I discovered inside blew me away. Nidhogg is a pretty simple game with a simple goal: feed yourself to the Nidhogg. As you strive for the ultimate goal of being dinner for a giant monster worm, hundreds of rabid onlookers cheer and watch as you battle it out for their amusement. What more could you want?

The gameplay of Nidhogg is pretty simple. Each player takes control of a sword fighter and start dueling. Whenever you kill your opponent, you take control over the camera, allowing you to run to your side of the screen and progress towards your Nidhogg—which basically turns it into a giant murderous game of tug of war, trading kills and running back and forth in a vain attempt to appease the crowd’s bloodlust. 

When I first loaded it up, the graphics immediately reminded me of a high-res Atari game, which gives them a certain charm. The way the stages look after a heated battle with all the orange and yellow blood stains dotting the map is awesome, and helps to showcase the locations of the battles you’ve had in your vain attempts to reach your Nidhogg. 

The game does have a single player version but it pales in comparison to the multiplayer mode. There's a certain rush of adrenaline when you fight a close battle, trading kills back and forth, rushing to make up as much ground as possible between kills, and chucking as many swords as you can. Unfortunately the game loses its flair when you play by yourself. Nidhogg does have an online multiplayer feature if you’re on your own and looking to play with others which is fun, if not a bit repetitive.

The game also has a ton of variants for when it starts to get stale which really add to the length of the game and the variants are pretty crazy. They range from simple things like turbo and slow mode and as crazy as boomerang swords and the always awesome and gruesome spine swords. What are spine swords you ask? It’s very simple: if you kill your opponent with a melee attack on the ground you’ll rip out his spine and use it as a sword—by far one of the coolest things you can do. The best part is there’s no limit to how many variants you can have on at once, so the more you pile on the more hectic the game becomes and it invariably ends up being a mad dash to the Nidhogg.

Honestly I didn’t expect all that much of this game going in and it blew me away. Nidhogg has provided me with hours of fun and I would highly recommend adding it to your Steam library.