Heimdall is a figure of Norse mythology who guarded the bifrost bridge, the link between the world of man en the world of the gods. The final battle for the worlds called ragnarok is coming but the evil Loki has stolen three of the gods weapons, Odin’s sword, Frey’s spear and Thor’s hammer. The gods cannot retrieve the weapons themselves so now Heimdall has been tasked to find and retrieve them before Ragnarok is upon them.
The weapons have been hidden on three worlds, Midgard or earth, Utgard the world of giants and finally Asgard the home of the gods themselves. You must travel along islands and places on these worlds to find the weapons. Your journey will not be easy because you will have to face not only monsters but traps and puzzles block your way as well. The starting menu is somewhat strange as it allows you to play the game with or without minigames, these refer to the three starting action minigames which will determine which characters you can choose. There a axethrow in which you must cut braids of a womans head by throwing axes, a chase and capture a board game and a ship fighting game. If you do well then some of the more powerfull selectable characters become available but if you don’t do well you can only select the regular characters.
Each world consists of islands to which you can travel and each island contains many rooms with puzzles and monsters. Many of the puzzles revolve around pushing buttons or levers which is pretty standard fare. The combat is rather weird instead of a more action oriented approach you simply see a picture of your opponent and you select options like attack or run. This would be pretty normal for a regular RPG but it doesn’t really fit well for this game in which you directly control you character in a overhead view.
I have some mixed feelings about Heimdall, on one hand I kinda like Norse mythology (like many others) but the story is a bit weird and during the game there is little to no story advancement as the only object in the game is to find the three missing weapons. Once you find one it’s simply on to the next world and more islands till you find all three. The puzzles and combat are ok but somehow don’t feel right combined, it’s not really an action RPG and not a regular RPG either. Combined with the less than stellar graphics and next to no music and sound this really makes for a less than stellar experience. Unless you don’t have any other RPG’s to play you can check it out but this game is not one of my favorites.
Overal rating: 5/10
This game was released for several different systems here are some notes:
| Amiga | Released in 1991. This is the original version, there is a lot of disk swapping as there are 6disks and loading times aren’t that great. |
| DOS | Released in 1992. This is pretty much like the amiga version only with no loading times. |
| Sega CD | Released in 1994. The intro has a lot more animations and speech but gameplay is basically the same. The icon based controls don’t work well with a joypad though. |
| Others | This version is not available. Atari ST released in 1991. |
| Date added | Apr-11-2008 09:40 |
| Name | Heimdall |
| Developer | The 8th day |
| Publisher | Virgin |
| First released | 1992 |
| Genre | RPG |
