Played En Garde and it’s got a neat little combat system and general beat-em-up structure. It’s not perfect but feels like it shares a lot of the design philosophy of combat-oriented Devolver games (although it isn’t Devolver) where it’s about clearing rooms quickly, stylishly, without being hit and just a few enemy variants.
It’s got Arkham crowd control DNA although the camera locks you to face forward in combat. You’re mostly playing reactively and the moveset boils down to an attack-parry-dodge menu with kicking and throwing objects for environmental interaction. When things work, and you don’t get touched, it can feel very good, but you can get away with a lot by just spamming dodge. Although you can remain safe quite easily, you can make some nice stage fencing happen. It’s just not necessary to be fully effective. So, the question for the player is how much do you want to roleplay into the fantasy of being bisexual Zorro.
Collisions get a bit juddery and kickable objects mess up a lot of stuff by blocking you or enemy pathfinding. Soldiers can get stuck on ledges and things interacts strangely whenever something moves over the side of a ramp/stairs. There’s a soft lock-on that tethers you to an enemy, which is fine, but when you’re surrounded you often want to be somewhere else so you’re trying to wrestle with the system to get out of an enemy’s orbit. You can sprint around a room in a way that enemies can’t, but lock-on slows your pace right down and moving between the two is fussy.
Even though the game’s focus isn’t platforming, levels feature this automatic rope and pole swinging traversal mechanic that feels silkier than some parkour mechanics in other games. Generally, I’m impressed with the levels since they mix function and fiction simply and don’t feel overly ambitious, tripping over itself to be like a bigger game. The final level is the only one with a bridge over water which feels more like a mechanical novelty since it lets you one-shot enemies by staggering then kicking them off. There are only 4 levels total, but they work to teach you and focus around a central idea with a unique visual theme for each. It’s how beat-em-up levels should be, and the size of the game feels right for an indie. There’s an arena mode I didn’t really play with much, but I guess somebody could spend ages getting really good at it. You can also just blaze through it if you want.
I think when people complain about games being too long, they’re really getting at a scale issue since this game could sustain interest for 4 hours or 40 depending on what you want from it, but it’s been tuned to fit a wide range and doesn’t demand a huge time investment to access the meat. That said, the game isn’t really essential but is a good execution of swashbuckler.
That was fun!!