Grade: D+
Play a sentient sword who pulls around his hero.
There’s a princess that’s captured, and the prince is terrified and nervous about doing the traditional “save the princess” quest. Luckily, the king orders a wizard to create a sentient sword to protect the prince. The prince cowers in the corner while the sword does all the work. You, the veritable gamer, play the sword.
The premise was fun, and I went into Swung with high hopes.
Fun premise didn’t live up to gameplay.
But, as I got into the game, it just didn’t click for me. I found the animations to be clunky. For example, the pixel explosion when you defeated an enemy was bland. But, on top of that, this same bland animation when the Prince killed a monster was also used when the prince died. This redundancy of uninteresting animations made the game visually unappealing.
Secondly, to my taste, the controls felt unresponsive and it seemed like every action you took lagged slightly. This was especially prevalent when you needed to do fiddly tasks like deflect arrows or redirect exploding birds.
Lastly, the save points were really far apart at times. If I were enjoying the gameplay otherwise, I would have pushed through. But, when the animation and controls weren’t to my taste, it felt like a chore to go back to lengthy checkpoints. I ended up getting through chapter 1 and hung it up there.
Swung was created by Extra Nice Studios, an independent game studio in the Netherlands, and some of their other games look intriguing. While this game was “Swung and a Miss” for me, maybe I’ll try others from this studio.
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