Sword and Sworcery Review [iPad]

Poke the sprites, rub the rainbows, and touch the correct sheep. And you probably don’t want to eat the mushrooms to be on the safe side…then again, maybe you do! Swords and Sworcery is a game like no other and if you’re looking for something new, this might just be up your alley.

Swords and Sworcery features a classic 8-bit presentation, which not everyone will be fans of. However, I did like this as you can truly appreciate 8-bit if it’s done correctly. Your main character awakens one day to find a quest in front of them. This then unfolds into an adventurous story where you’re off to find these sprites and rid the land of evil. Sounds pretty straight forward right? Well, it is, but it’s awesome!

The gameplay is a standard “touch and go” style; you either double tap where you want your character to go to, or you touch and hold moving your character accordingly. This allows you to interact with other characters in game, listening to what they have to say, or getting hints as you go. There’s some nice attention to detail with the whole “touch” interaction as you can move your finger across the bushes to see them rustle or motion across the water to see splashes happen. I like seeing this in games as detail is such a crucial aspect to have.

In the game you’re armed with a good ol’ sword and shield and require you to rotate your iPad to portrait mode when you enter.  You’ll see a shield icon on the bottom left hand side and sword on the right. You can either block when the opponent attacks or you can strike, all pretty straight forward. I was hoping to see more sword battles throughout the game, as you might assume from the title, but when I finished it I found myself saying, “Actually… that was alright.” I won’t spoil anything by telling you how to fight the main [boss] battles, as they are quite interesting. But I will hint at this: if you’ve played Zelda games before, you’ll know what to do. One word of advice, make sure your iPad screen is clean as I had some issues in battle when the attacks didn’t register. Maybe it was due to a dirty screen, maybe due to a glitch in the game, but it never hurts to clean it up.

Combat aside, there’s a nice bunch of puzzles to solve throughout the game which will get you thinking. One of the first puzzles you’ll run into is touching sheep in the correct order to get a Sprite to appear. It’s simple, fun and it works well. However; the huge focus with S&S is the music. You can definitely see influences from Zelda, Metroid and a few other games which make it instantly stand out from other iPad games. Being an avid video game soundtrack lover, this instantly won a spot on my digital shelf as the music was like no other. I found myself thinking “I want this soundtrack,” because it really is that good. I want to do a second play-through just so I can listen to all sorts of cool music that’s in the game. Crank up your iPad speakers or better yet, connect it to a set of computer speakers/ Bluetooth speakers, I promise you won’t regret it.

Swords and Sworcery was a game that was very different from others on the iPad. I found myself fully immersed into the gameplay.  One moment I loved it and other’s I was swearing at the iPad during boss battles. Who says an awesome iPad game has to be in full 3D with lots of guns and explosions? Sometimes, it’s the simple and basic games that really steal the spotlight. These show us that less can be more, especially in the end. I’m really hoping to see a second or third instalment in the series, it would be fantastic!