Parodies or spoofs of ancient civilizations are often utilized as themes in video games that have next to reverence for history but focuses on silliness instead. Swords and Soldiers is the latest one.
Debuting on the WiiWare first, Swords and Soldiers appealed to those interested in it with its very simple RTS gameplay, which can be considered to be of the tower offense sub-genre (which is the reverse of tower defence gameplay, in which the player sends waves of units against enemy towers, or other waves). Its other appeal is its comical and light-hearted presentation.The HD version, which is made for Steam, does not do much of anything different gameplay-wise and thematically, but then it is a port.
In the Steam version of the game, the mouse has been adopted as the main form of control. However, there would not be much to click away on if the game is to be compared to more sophisticated RTS games. At most, the player will be clicking on buttons at the top of the screen to requisition more troops, or convert the mouse icon into that for a spell's so that the spell can be cast on something on-screen. There will be no selecting of units or buildings, as to be expected of a tower offense game.
This is certainly not a game for those looking for deep complexity in the strategy games that they would play, but for those that aren't, there can be quite a lot of silly, cheesy and, of course, cartoonish fun to be had with the game.
The premise is really simple – and outrageous. There are three different factions in the game: the Vikings, the Chinese and the Aztecs. The only similarities that they have with the real ancient civilizations are just cosmetic, and even these are still far removed from the real looks of the latter. Of course, being a game that targets a wide audience, including minors, having them too closely resemble the true ancient civilizations would not have been a family-friendly decision on the part of the game-makers, as the ancient civilizations have rather bloody histories.
Therefore, instead, the Vikings are barbecue-loving people and would do anything to prepare for their next glut, including storming the estates of other civilizations for ingredients. The Aztecs are ruled by pompous god-figures who would see anything more magnificent than they and their works cast down, and apparently have a penchant for growing giant spices. The Chinese are ruled by either child monarchs, or senile old ministers, both of whom are very fickle.
For those who cherish the knowledge of ancient civilizations, this may well seem like an affront, but for those who do not give a single care, this zany spoofing can elicit a snicker or two, if not a chuckle.
Anyway, the player starts the game by creating a profile, which lists the completion percentage of the single-player challenges in the game, among other data that the player has accrued by playing the game. Considering that the game appears to be targeted at game consumers who play casually, having options for a single machine to have multiple profiles for the game is a good decision (a decision that not many indie or casual game designers remember to take).
The player is then shown the various game modes that can be played. Generally, with the exception of some of the challenges in Challenge mode, the player experiences the game's tower offense gameplay in most of the other modes. The player has to pick a faction first (more on the factions later), and for skirmish mode, that of the opposing player. There can only ever be two players, human or A.I., in multiplayer and skirmish modes, by the way.
The player then starts a match with a view of his/her "base" and its surroundings. The "base" is called various names throughout the game, e.g. "castle", "fortress", "palace", but considering that this is the only building that will produce units and is an ever-active source of income, this is best considered as the "base" according to RTS game nomenclature.
The base is initially quite an unimpressive building, one of its few animated sprites being that of the so-called leader of the faction. At first impression, these leaders are amusingly expressive fellows; the Viking leader is a rotund fellow who is sitting upon what appears to be the bucket of a catapult while waving around a shank of meat like it is a sword and the Aztez leader is a haughty-looking god-king who appears to be always snickering. The Chinese leader seems less comical and may even come across as regal, though this facade falls apart to give way to tantrums when things turn sour (more on sprite animations later).
Of course, these characters are just there for cosmetic purposes. What the player should know is that protecting his/her base is of the utmost importance, while of second-most importance is the bringing down of the opponent's own base (at least for modes other than story mode). To do this, the player must of course raise an army; only his/her troops (with the exception of two types of units) can directly damage the enemy base. The base also generates a trickle of gold.
Depending on the starting conditions of a match (which can only be changed in skirmish mode), the player may start out with just one gold-gathering unit and a bit of mana and gold to make the first spending decision. From here, the player's chosen build strategy may or may not lead him/her to victory.
Regardless of any build, the player will have to peruse the upgrade screen to enable purchase options for troops and casting options for spells, as the only troop option available to the player at the start of any match is the gold-gatherer. There are no spells available from the start too.
Any faction has at least three upgrade options at the beginning: one for the faction's core melee troop, one for its core ranged troop and one associated with the spell-casting mechanic of the game (more on this later). Therefore, there are at least some variations that a player can have when making early-match decisions.
However, most players would probably go for either core troop first, if only to produce one single unit to be sent towards the enemy base to do some scouting, or perhaps even encounter the scout that the enemy would send. (There are ways to avoid such an occurrence, though this depends on the map design and will be elaborated on later.)
Yet, the player would not be able to glean much about the opponent's strategies from scouting if said opponent does nothing much, e.g. did not create units to scout, which would of course give away any possible strategic decision to be taken next. This is because there is no specific visual changes to a player's base when a specific upgrade is purchased; only bits and pieces are added to the player's castle, temple or fort, and these are added in the same order regardless of the type of upgrade purchased.
In other words, a player won't know what the opponent has in store until he/she/it shows its hand, by when it may be a little late for the player to develop countermeasures.
This is because obtaining upgrades take time and the recruiting of troops and the casting of spells are subjected to cool-down times. Considering how simple the gameplay is, these design measures may well have overbalanced the game, making it easier for players who already have the advantage of momentum to retain it. This further contributes to the likelihood that players would forfeit a match before it even ends because they already know impending defeat before they even see it.
Of course, this only happens some time later into the match, when more upgrade options become available after the root ones have been taken. These other base upgrade options unlock more "advanced" troops, such as troops that inflict debuffs on enemy troops that they encounter, troops that raise undead from the fallen, troops that can inflict area-effect damage or troops that do two or more of the above.
For example, the Aztecs have priests that are virtually defenceless but can raise skeleton minions from corpses of any kind, thus giving the Aztec player free units that cannot be poisoned, which is a powerful damage-over-time and slowdown debuff (that is incidentally an Aztec specialty). Another example is the Zen Master, who can levitate any enemy troop and eventually destroy it, but cannot do much against buildings or hordes.
These troops are generally more expensive than the core units and are more difficult to utilize, but they appear to add enough depth and variety to the strategic considerations that the player would have, which is of course commendable. They won't be surprising any strategy game veteran though, as none of the troop designs are refreshingly new.
As Swords and Soldiers has tower offense elements, the player has no control over the troops that he/she/it purchases and sends into battle. They appear from the player's base and move towards the enemy's, engaging any enemy along the way in the only way they know how, or just die trying. They will not turn back in any way (unless they have been subjected to mind control by an Aztec player, in which case they turn turncoat). The most that the player could do is to time the recruitment of these troops such that they clash with the enemy under the best circumstances.
There is a way to take some control over their movement, but this is highly dependent on the map currently in play. Some maps are just single 2-D stretches connecting the two bases together, whereas some others have alternative paths for certain segments of the map, though there are ever only two for each segment and they all ultimately lead to the enemy base. The player can control which path troops take before they arrive at the junction by switching the road sign just before it, but at best this is only useful for making sure troops engage in fights that they are designed for.
At least the tools given to the player for him/her to navigate around the map are easy to use. The player only needs to right-click anywhere along the bottom of the screen where a simple, slider-like representation of the map is located to zip to the location of the map depicted by the slider. A keyboard button automatically resets the screen to a view of the player's base.
The spell-casting mechanic of the game offers more control than the troop-hiring mechanic. After unlocking spells with the associated upgrades, the player can convert the mouse icon into that of a spell's with a click on the right icon; spell icons have blue trims to their icons for differentiation with icons for the recruiting of troops, handily enough.
However, a discerning player will point out that there may be a technical issue with casting spells: the game is ultimately 2D, so sprites may overlap each other and make casting spells on specific individuals practically impossible if they are bunched up. This has always been a problem with games that have everything displayed on what is ultimately a flat plane, and it is a serious user-friendliness issue.
Fortunately, the game designers have thought of this and have implemented scripts that are surprisingly smart at guessing which individual among a bunch that the player wants to cast a spell on. For example, a player may want to shield an injured Swordsman among a bunch of his compatriots, which are not even hurt at all and thus do not urgently need any protection. Simply clicking a Shield spell as close as possible to the injured Swordsman would have the spell being cast on the injured Swordsman instead of any of the others.
Of course, the game designers have not thought of every possibility when designing these scripts. Raising another example with bunched up Swordsmen again, there may be more than one Swordsmen that are injured. Casting the shield spell on said bunch would have the game simply picking the Swordsman that is the closest to the cursor, which, of course, may as well be any of them from the perspective of the player.
Another example to show that the scripts are not designed for every situation is a bunch of injured Berserkers that is to be healed with healing spells, one by one. Ideally, the player may want to heal the foremost Berserker because he is going to be the first to meet the enemy, but landing a Heal spell on the bunch is more than likely to heal the most injured Berserker first. To heal the foremost Berserker, the player has to land the heal spell further ahead from the bunch; the game does not inform the player of this.
Other than these situations, spells are generally easy to use, perhaps with the exception of a couple of high level spells. It could have been made even more convenient if the game highlights the area that will be affected by an area-effect spell, but the absence of this visual aid is not much of a problem if the player can gauge how much area will be affected. For example, the player may not know how much area that an arrow storm spell affects when encountering it for the first time, but eventually gauging where to land it becomes easier when the player realizes that it follows the actual path of the map, instead of a horizontal distance.
The most powerful spells in the game are not fire-and-forget spells like the rest. Each of the faction in the game has a spell that plays a cutscene when they are cast. For the Vikings', it smashes a large area for a lot of damage and plants a tower at the epicentre of where it hit. For the Chinese's, the spell summons a dragon with limited fuel for breathing fire on enemies; the player can choose when it barfs fire as it zooms across the map. The Aztecs perhaps have the most difficult to use spell, but only because it has the most damage potential: it drops a large boulder that deals a lot of damage to anything it runs over, though it can also run over the player's own units if he/she does not make the boulder jump over them.
These spells cost the most mana, but a timely application can easily turn the tide of battle. Unfortunately, the Aztec and Chinese spells, for whatever reason, cause the screen to be tinted brown, reducing visual contrast. Considering how fast the Boulder and Dragon moves, the visuals should have been as sharp as possible to aid their utilization.
Speaking of mana, each player, regardless of faction, has a continuous trickle of mana that is always available regardless of the battlefield situation. However, each faction has its own way of getting more mana. The Vikings has a straight-forward method: they merely need to purchase mana generation upgrades.
Upon researching the Sacrifice spell, the Aztecs can kill off their own troops to gain mana. To prevent an Aztec player with fantastic hand-to-eye coordination from exploiting this design to profit off the impending death of his/her own troops, the amount of mana gained from a sacrifice depends on the remaining health of the sacrifice. In other words, sacrificing is at best just an exchange of gold for mana, which would place the Aztecs at a severe disadvantage in gaining mana when they are compared to the Vikings and Chinese.
On the other hand, the game does allow the Aztec player to kill off skeleton minions for free mana, and there can be a tremendous amount to be had from killing off a swath of "fresh" undead. However, this also means that the Aztecs are a lot more predictable in their build strategies: the Aztecs must recruit priests to raise skeletal hordes to be harvested for mana to support spell-casting strategies, or to be used as meat-shields to screen the living troops.
The Chinese must build Buddha statues at tower locations in the map to increase their mana generation rate. These statues are completely defenceless (which is perhaps fitting – and wise, as arming these statues would be quite a shock to those who have reverence for Buddhas), which means that the Chinese have to trade the rights for static defences with the rights to generate more mana. Furthermore, if the map layout does not favour a player by having tower locations as close to his/her base as possible, strategies oriented around casting spells may be difficult to pull off for the Chinese player.
Speaking of static defences, the Aztecs have the most convenient and effective static defence: their giant idols can engage enemies from quite far away and do damage continuously with their eye-beams. The Vikings' require a bit more micro-management: the player has to build towers that then have to be manned with Axe-throwers, who are rather slow. An unmanned tower is little more than a defenceless obstacle. Furthermore, the Axe-Thrower and the tower have separate health counters, so the Axe-thrower can be damaged separately, usually via spells.
It has to be mentioned that the targeting scripts for the Vikings' and Aztecs' static defences are not straight-forward simple, e.g. they do not just shoot at the nearest target and then keep shooting. They will often prioritize high-value targets over others; against the Chinese and Vikings, this behaviour is much appreciated, as their high-value units tend to be low-health troops. Against the Aztecs, however, their most expensive unit, the Sun Giant. Is a brute that can take a lot of damage.
The Aztecs' advantage in conveniently easy-to-use static defences and access to meat-shields in the form of the Sun Giants or skeletal minions (or both) do give them an advantage in troop-oriented strategies, though this, again, makes them a bit more predictable.
If a base comes under attack after a player has lost control of the map, this is almost always the death knell for said player. There is a constant healing buff for any units that are close to the base, but this is just not fast enough to turn the tide of battle. Only vast amounts of reserve gold and mana can do that, but this is unlikely to happen as it is a rather risky strategy to hoard a lot of gold instead of spending them on upgrades and troops, and hoarding mana meant that the player has not spent them on earlier efforts to prevent the enemy player from gaining momentum.
Furthermore, with enemies so close to the base, gold-harvesting is just not possible and the base generates gold so slowly. This means that the difficulties faced by a player under siege is compounded with economic paralysis.
Moreover, that there is a cool-down time for the recruitment of any kind of troops means that a besieged player cannot suddenly overwhelm the attackers with large numbers of troops, even with enough gold to buy a lot of troops. There are of course spells, but only the most powerful and mana-costly ones can bail a player out of trouble, and even so this is not a certainty as they require skill and timing to use effectively. They also have long cool-down times.
All these problems that the besieged player faces mean that he/she is practically doomed if there is a stream of enemy troops flowing from the enemy base towards the player's. Thus, most players would realize that there is little reason to continue when this happens. This can lead to underwhelming victories when the other player simply forfeits a match before the final showdown.
Learning about all of the above gameplay mechanics and the differences among the three factions is best done through playing the story campaigns before the other modes. Each faction has one campaign for itself, and the scenarios within it generally introduce the troops, spells and nuances of the faction in a gradual manner, though the Chinese campaign can be rather abrupt in its introduction of units and have scenarios that are more frustrating to deal with than those of the other factions' campaigns.
In addition to the usual scenarios of building up armies via the player's base to crush the enemy with, there are scenarios where the player does not have access to a base and has a handful of units, has a base and army but no control over them but is given plenty of mana for spells, has constant reinforcements but have to divert and divvy them around with paths so as to get them to engage in advantageous fights, etc. These scenarios apparently require the player to learn how to utilize the mechanics of the game for maximum effectiveness, and surprisingly, doing so is not difficult (at least for strategy game veterans).
Completing all of the campaigns will unlock the fastest game speed, Turbo. As game speed suggests, it controls the speed of games, but only in single-player; multiplayer mode does not have any speed control options for purposes of gameplay balance and accommodating differences between the players' capabilities. However, it is unlikely that most players would consider playing at Turbo speed in single-player matches, as the A.I. is certainly not impaired in any way by the accelerated pace.
Speaking of enemy A.I.-controlled players, they are gimped in story mode, where they have very limited decision-making scripts to compensate for out-of-the-norm advantages that they have, such as the ability to cast multiple poison clouds in rapid succession. The player will find that getting the gold-gatherer count to the maximum of 10 is of paramount urgency in story campaign scenarios, so as to have enough gold to deal with any surprises that would be thrown at the player.
However, the A.I. is fully enabled in Skirmish, where it is far smarter and more flexible. Considering the simplicity of the gameplay in Swords and Soldiers, playing Skirmish mode is a good way to practice for multiplayer matches. As for multiplayer matches themselves, finding an online opponent is made easy using the game's integration into Steam, though it means that the player can only play with other Steam users. Matches appear to be smooth, though this is likely due to the simple gameplay which would not place too much strain on online infrastructures.
In addition to skirmish, campaign and online mode, there are also Challenges to be played for the fulfilment of completionist tendencies and Steam achievements; these challenges are unlocked by playing the story campaigns. There are only three, but each is quite different from the rest, though not all of them are equally fun.
Firstly, there is Berserker Run, where the player has to guide a single Berserker through a gauntlet of enemies that is certain to destroy him if the player does not make use of spells to aid him. This is perhaps the most interesting Challenge.
The Boulder challenge has the player guiding a boulder to crush Viking troops while avoiding Aztec ones. However, this challenge has the same problem that the Aztec Boulder spell has, which is the brown tinting of the screen that reduces the visual contrast.
The last Challenge is Survival, which, as its name suggests, has the player struggling against relentless waves of increasingly numerous and diverse enemy troops, who are also supported by an A.I. that casts spells to aid them.
Overall, the gameplay designs for Swords and Soldiers are solid and strikes a surprisingly satisfactory balance between simplicity for those who are new to strategy games and only play casually, and depth for those who like to be rewarded for having devised an intuitive plan to defeat his/her opponent.
Yet, Swords and Soldiers' gameplay would not be impressing the more jaded of strategy game veterans (if they even bothered to look its way), as whatever gameplay there is in it already has been done in more sophisticated titles in the strategy genre. On the other hand, what would be impressive is the game's presentation.
As mentioned earlier, the game does not concern itself with historical accuracy. Lampooning and parodying the existing stereotypes of Vikings, Aztecs and ancient Chinese is the order of the day though, and there are heaps of this.
The most apparent evidence of this lies in the voice-acting for the characters in the game. When the Viking Axe-thrower utters a slightly different version of the quote "bring out the axes!" as "bring out the accent!" in his very stereotypical Norse burr, a discerning player would realize that the game does not take itself seriously. Further examples of amusingly, deliberately bad voice-acting include all of the voice-overs for Chinese troops, all of whom have cheesy and forced Oriental accents which are used to deliver silly statements, such as the overtly obvious "I have a sword" that the Swordman utters with a clear lisp.
For better or worse, the writing for the story campaigns are not accompanied by voice-overs. As mentioned earlier, the three factions are very, very culturally different from the real ancient civilizations, and the story campaigns will exploit this to cook up zany scenarios that showcase the irreverence of the writing. Of course, if one has followed the more uproarious of present-day cartoons, the zaniness in Swords and Soldiers would not be much of a surprise, though it has to be mentioned here that there are few indie games that can present silliness like Aztecs participating in agricultural produce competitions and a visual flourish that resembles that used for episodes of the 1980s Batman and Robin show playing before every scenario starts.
Next, there are the visual designs for this game. Much of the game is presented with unabashedly cartoonish aplomb, such as otherwise fearsome warriors of ancient times being reduced to stylized caricatures, e.g. the Aztec Jaguar Warrior who appears to be wearing a cat-fur cap on his head and carrying a mace as big as he is.
The background is purely cosmetic in function as the maps are composed of nothing but 2-D paths. However, they have some interesting thematic designs to look at if the player has time to keep his/her eyes off the battlefield for a while. For example, the Chinese homeland appears to have a lot of pink and red, giving an impression that it is either in perpetual early autumn or is made of cotton candy.
Troops who die in battle simply keel over bloodlessly, eyes literally crossed, tongues sticking out, frowns on their faces and such other expressions to signify cartoon death. That these sprites are oriented in the same way regardless of terrain may lead to some visual oddities, such as bodies lying horizontally on distinctly sloped paths. Sprites of corpses also overlap easily, making it difficult to gauge the density of corpse fields. This is especially the case in some scenarios in the Aztec and Chines campaigns.
Sprites of living troops also overlap when they bunch up, as mentioned earlier, though the game does appear to put some effort into preventing their sprites from being displayed in exactly the same location; it appears to present bunches of troops as stacks, which makes it a bit easier to gauge how many individuals there are in a bunch.
Speaking of sprites, the game has no problem displaying dozens, if not hundreds of separate sprites on-screen at a time. For example, there is a scenario where a lot of skeletal minions would be raised against the player, who is expected to counter this horde with swathes of his/her own troops and a lot of area effect spells, the result of which would be plenty of things happening on-screen.
When defences start to falter and bases come under attack from enemies, the sprites for the faction leaders change to other frames, showing their displeasure at having enemies literally right at their doorstep. When the bases go down, the changes in their sprites can seem drastic, but also very amusing: the Viking leader cries like a big baby, the Chinese leader's tantrum gets especially more frantic and the Aztec leader appears to pleads for mercy, all of these voiced-over with short but comical utterances.
All of the visual occurrences above are accompanied by plenty of sound effects. It appears that every type of troops has its own associated sound effects (and voice-overs), such as the amusingly sci-fi noise that Ninja Monkeys make when they teleport. They can seem quite entertaining, but when there are many things happening on-screen, such as many troops fighting each other under the shadow of towers and a barrage of spells from both players, the din can be rather unpleasant.
The music soundtracks are cheery and playful, and in the case of the soundtracks associated with the Chinese faction, entertainingly cheesy. There are few of them and they do eventually loop, but if a player does not mind such upbeat soundtracks, they would be hard to fault.
In conclusion, Swords and Soldiers HD definitely does not offer anything substantially new since its debut on WiiWare, so those who played the original would not be getting much value from the Steam version if they are mulling over it. However, the gameplay and presentation that made the WiiWare version so charming are ported over to the Steam version flawlessly, such that it may be worth a look by those who do not already know about the game.