Reviews

Heavy Sword Review: A retro-inspired platformer that borrows heavily from the classics

Heavy Sword is a new retro-inspired platformer from Monster Robot Studios. The game combines great modernized SNES-era graphics with traditional platforming elements to create a solid game that is worth playing. The game borrows heavily from the classics in the genre, but does this end up helping or hindering it from being a must play experience?

 Name: Heavy Sword | Publisher: Monster Robot | Category: Platformer | Players: 1 | Version: 2.0 | Size: 37 MB | Price: $1.99

The Story

Heavy Sword starts out with a brief cut scene showing a group of goblins kidnapping a princess from her castle. Your follows in fresh pursuit, with the clear intention of bringing the princess back home in one piece. The storyline is typical for the genre, and it works for a game that is trying to be a throw-back to the past. It may not be anything special, but really, who plays this type of game for the storyline anyway? 

The Gameplay

If you have played a side-scrolling platformer before you will have no problem jumping right into Heavy Sword. You have arrow keys to move your character either left or right, and you also have a button to jump and a button to attack. Heavy Sword rarely deviates from the traditional framework laid out by classic games in the genre.

The combat in Heavy Sword stands out as a bit different though. Rather than jumping on your enemies heads or shooting super-charged lasers from your arm-gun you will be heading into combat with a variety of swords. You start off with a small sword with basic attributes, but throughout each stage you will come across power-ups that will give you a bigger and fancier swords. Not surprisingly, the bigger the sword means the higher the damage you dish out. 

Though the combat mechanic is unique to the genre, I felt it was also one of the weakest aspects of the game. Since most of the combat is done through melee attacks, you will have to physically stop at each enemy, and then start hacking away at them. Unfortunately, tapping repeatedly on the attack button isn’t a whole lot of fun, and since most enemies require a fair number of slashes to be defeated, it really slows the pace of the gameplay. Near the end of the game I found myself avoiding as many enemy encounters as I could just to reach the end of the level quicker. 

Fortunately, the controls were spot on the entire time, which was a huge plus for the game. While the gameplay in Heavy Sword is mostly well done, it was a bit hard to not find it a bit lackluster at times.

The Graphics

Graphically, Heavy Sword looks fantastic. The game sports a gorgeous SNES-era art style, while upping the level of polish to give everything a fresh and modern feel. There are a fair number of graphical similarities to Super Mario World here, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A lot of the backgrounds and level designs are surprisingly similar, and even the world map is clearly based off of the one in SMW. In a nostalgic way these similarities are pretty cool, but it’s hard to not feel that the developer relied a bit too much on mimicking this classic game, rather than trying to create something unique to the genre. At least Heavy Sword has created its own unique enemy units, which all look nice, and have fluid animations. The graphics definitely received a great amount of polish, and are very close to being flawless. Unfortunately, I did find myself running into a fair number of frame-rate drops during my time with the game. These occurances were by no means game breaking, but they are definitely something worth mentioning.

The Sound

The sound design in Heavy Sword left me feeling a little disappointed. Though the rock/bit-tune combo sounds great, it sadly ends up hurting the game in the end. The music volume has been set too high, which completely overpowers and covers up all of the game’s sound effects. I imagine Heavy Sword has some stellar sound effects in it, but without being able to toggle the music volume there is no way to really know. There is an option in the menu to disable the music all together, but then you are without the well made soundtrack. Hopefully some sort of volume control will get implemented in a future update.

 

Conclusion

Giving a rating to Heavy Sword is a bit difficult to do without comparing it to to other platformers. The game borrows so heavily from the the classics, which can be seen as both a good and a bad thing. In one way it is nice to feel right at home with controls that feel instantly familiar, but at the same time it is hard not wish that the game would have tried a bit harder to be something completely new and exciting. However, Heavy Sword does still manage to manages to be a solid platformer, and should be worth your time if you’re looking for a throwback to the past.  If you are expecting something that tries to revolutionize the genre, you will be in for some disappointment. All in all though you could do a whole lot worse than Heavy Sword.

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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