When Vikings Attack ... you're supposed to throw stuff at them

So vikings can be jerks. This is not news. They burn, they pillage, they do other mean nasty stuff that we'd rather not go into. Cool as they might seem in the movies, if a viking showed up at your house, you can bet he's not there for supper. You should keep that in mind as we talk about When Vikings Attack, a PSN game coming to Vita and PS3 later this year. It's developed by Clever Beans, a studio made up of two gents in northern England, and it seeks to tell the world just how to best deal with a possible viking menace.

So vikings can be jerks. This is not news. They burn, they pillage, they do other mean nasty stuff that we'd rather not go into. Cool as they might seem in the movies, if a viking showed up at your house, you can bet he's not there for supper.

You should keep that in mind as we talk about When Vikings Attack, a PSN game coming to Vita and PS3 later this year. It's developed by Clever Beans, a studio made up of two gents in northern England, and it seeks to tell the world just how to best deal with a possible viking menace.

Players command what could only be described as mobs of people. They move around the screen as a pack, able to grow in size by walking into nearby pedestrians. A bigger mob allows heavier items to be picked up and thrown at, you guessed it, mobs of vikings. So while a mailbox might take out one or two, a car might take out a whole mess of them in one go. Meanwhile, the vikings are trying to do the same thing to your mob.

While the game has a co-op friendly campaign, the real enjoyment came when I tried out multiplayer. Up to four players control their own mobs, hurling objects at one another. There's some strategy at play to keep things interesting. If your mob isn't holding anything, they can actually catch objects that have been thrown at them out of mid air, dodgeball style. This turns each multiplayer match into a game of cat and mouse as players try to guess when the others are going to make a move. As an added bonus, multiplayer is cross-play friendly, so you could have three people on Vitas and one on the PS3 and they all intermingle peacefully.

In all, When Vikings Attack seems like a clever, surprisingly cute (for a game about vikings) PSN release, worth keeping an eye on as it nears launch later this year.