Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By John Walker on September 13th, 2012 at 4:00 pm.

Here’s a thought. If Kongregate doesn’t add a mute button I’m going to find everyone involved and poke them in the eye. I’m reminded of this after playing SWOOOORD! Colon Lords Of The Sword for a bit. It’s a dungeon-crawling action game, with randomly generated levels, and incredibly frequent permadeath.

I’m still coming around to the concept of permadeath. I’m the person who gets too attached to a Spelunky hero, or grieves the loss of “XLOWNMWF” in my 13,495th game of Dredmor. In SWOOOORD it’s a lot easier, as there are no names and not even a face. The super-blocky game leaves things pretty anonymous, instead focusing just on the combat. It’s a relatively simple affair of attack, bigger attack, block and dodge, but figuring out how best to use those once the enemies get a bit tougher is the hook.

I do strongly recommend downloading the game rather than playing it on Kong. That way you can change the resolution to match your monitor, and not have half the screen obscured by giant text and a pointless floating skill. And, indeed, should you have anyone else nearby, you could force them to play local co-op with you.

Once the picture is bigger, and you can use your web browser without hearing its monotonous guitar noise, there’s a lot more fun to be had. Each time I play I get a little bit further, and feel compelled to try again. There’s certainly no real depth here – it’s very much about the combat, with no RPG pretensions at all. Picking up a different sword is pretty much as involved as it gets. But that combat is fun, challenging, and impressively, always fair. I die because I mess up, not because the game messes me around.

It’s free, and you can obviously test it out via Kongregate. But if you fancy a go, I suggest just downloading the weeny exe from here.

Cheers to Indie Games for the tip.