Sword of the Guardian

Genre: Arcade Brawler

Players: 1-3 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Sword of the Guardian is an Arcade Brawler set in a medieval fantasy setting, where up to three players play as a soldier, a monk, and a dwarf in a quest to fight an oppressive empire… or something. Yeah, it’s not exactly clear, but I’ll get to that later.

One of the more noteworthy things about this game is its presentation which is a mix of 3D environments and hand-drawn 2D characters. It’s an interesting combination of elements that strikes me as a bit… off. It’s not bad, per se, but it is distracting since the two don’t quite seem to fit together.

In part this is because the 2D characters aren’t very well-animated, while the backgrounds, being 3D, don’t have that limitation. The backgrounds are also a strange mix of impressive and unimpressive. You have some elements, like the water, that looks really fantastic… and then it’s marred by other elements like graphical glitches in the foliage and foreground elements popping in. In short, this presentation is really a mixed bag. However, I definitely feel that while the presentation has its positive qualities, it doesn’t justify the massive 7.9GB of memory the game takes up. Yikes.

This presentation is accompanied by a story that’s poorly-told and poorly-localized, to the point where it’s not clear exactly what motivates the protagonists, and the player has undoubtedly ceased to care before long, yet the game insists on pushing us through their back-and-forth jabber as they go on about ridiculous topics like a sect of church-employed ninja assassins and an evil empire killing passersby for seemingly no reason. Because they’re evil, I guess.

As for the gameplay itself, this is mostly pretty standard Arcade Brawler fare, although there are a few unique elements that are, again, a mixed bag. On the one hand, the game uses an interesting sub-weapon system that allows players to save up a limited variety of helpful items to use later. There’s also Street Fighter-esque commands that allow players to use a variety of moves with their characters. I give this game some credit for trying to shake up the formula here and there.

On the other hand though, just like the stilted animation, movement and action in this game often feels stiff and awkward. Not enough to make the game unplayable, but enough to make it just less fun to move around and fight. In addition, you’ll encounter a good number of “cheap” enemies, who can shoot projectiles from off-screen and, in some cases, even from completely inaccessible areas.

Sword of the Guardian was overall just an odd, confusing experience for me. There are small hints of brilliance here and there, but everything about this game is uneven. It has some good gameplay ideas mixed in with clunky movement, it has some impressive graphical effects among glitchy and mismatched graphical styles, and it seems to want to tell an epic story, but is stymied by poor writing and even poorer localization. Fans of the genre looking for something a bit unusual may want to give this game a shot, but most would be better off staying away.

tl;dr – Sword of the Guardian is an Arcade-style Brawler set in a medieval fantasy world that has you fighting soldiers as one of three characters. Unfortunately, everything about this game is extremely uneven, from a presentation that has some nice visual effects but also mismatched graphical styles and glitches, gameplay that has some nice mechanics but clunky movement, and a story that aspires to be epic but falls flat on its face. Overall, there is some good here, but it’s buried under a confusing mess that’s probably best to just not bother with.

Grade: C+

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