PLATFORM 3DS BATTLE SYSTEM INTERACTION ORIGINALITY STORY MUSIC & SOUND VISUALS CHALLENGE Moderate COMPLETION TIME Less than 20 Hours OVERALL + It's short - Repetitiously monotonous - Sloppy controls - Wears out its welcome real fast - Minute story with rotten localization - Inscrutable mechanics Click here for scoring definitions

   Several moderately successful attempts to fuse beat-em-ups with RPGs have taken place over the years, with titles such as Guardian Heroes and Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons entries holding up fairly well today. Swords and Darkness represents a far less entertaining fusion of the two, a game much less enjoyable than even some of the blandest pure beat-em-ups over the years. Saying that Streets of Rage or Final Fight is more entertaining today is an insult to both of those series: this game makes plenty of licensed cash-ins from over the years look decent.

   Swords and Darkness is a weapon-based beat-em-up akin to Golden Axe, pitting the player's knight against a series of foes roaming through a castle. One thing the game immediately distinguishes itself by is a pitiful roster of opponents. Initially the player will fight against two whites in knight armor at a time, but after beating the first boss, that number increases to three. In every room the same three opponents will pop up and charge, until enough of them are slain. Then a pause allows the player to either move along or wait for another trio to start the cycle over. In later rooms of the castle, the white knights change to black knights, and in a few late rooms cream-colored knights flanking a palette swap of the first boss become the opponents. The few rooms with any kind of feature that keeps them from being a bland rectangle stand out, but most of the locations in the castle have no such unique identity.

   Most beat-em-ups require different tactics to be used against the menagerie of opponents, but since these knights act pretty much the same regardless of their coloration, repeatedly attacking with the Y button will get the job done. Players looking to blast through the game can also simply dash through every room, jumping over the adversaries who rush forward, and make it to the edge without fighting anyone. While this will net no reward, sometimes the prospect of yet another room filled with identical foes is unappealing. All enemies cough up about the same amount of experience anyway, so killing the ones near the beginning carries no penalty. Bosses do demand a different strategy, which is to hit and run to the other side of the large rooms they invariably occupy. Use of this tactic will ensure success.

This will be accomplished by beating him into a stupor, of course.

   Swords and Darkness sports an extensive move list for the player that ends up being more frustrating than entertaining. Y is for light attacks and X unleashes heavy ones, while the B button jumps and A does nothing in combat. Aside from a dashing slash, this is the entire repertoire of a beginning knight, but items can be bought and found that enable more moves. All of these additional techniques require MP though, and the game's sensitivity to inadvertent button presses means activating something the player did not intend to do will happen regularly. The starting lineup of moves is also sufficient for finishing the game, plus the split second of extra time new techniques require to activate usually results in taking a hit. One other annoyance comes from the ease with which the player can transition between areas by reaching the current room's edge, making it far too easy to do so unintentionally.

   The RPG mechanics here stem from having an extensive inventory and skill points gained with each level. Inventory management is somewhat frustrating because of the need to wait a moment on the screen for items to take effect, along with the choice of the developer to keep number management to a minimum and only allow nine of anything to accumulate. At first, fresh equipment is offered after beating each boss at the two merchants in the game, but this is forgotten midway through and no further upgrades are offered except rare enemy drops. As for skill points, they do allow the player to increase statistics after each level, but the effect of these increases is difficult to determine. Only a significant number of skill points put toward most attributes have any visible effect upon the knight's prowess, requiring quite an investment to see any measurable improvement. The developers also made enemy statistics go up throughout the game, ensuring that about the same amount of force is necessary to beat them at all times.

   Swords and Darkness has a perfunctory narrative in which the kingdom of Athelstan has been overcome by the dark magic its king wielded to conquer a neighboring nation. The knight controlled by the player is the one person to enter this castle filled with undead soldiers, in an effort to purge evil from the kingdom. He encounters a few inhabitants of the structure, but they add nothing substantive to this skeletal narrative. The localization for what little text the game possesses is strikingly shoddy, with elementary typos and words not separated by spaces occurring quite often.

Notice how it's hard to tell which one is getting hit? That's not a good omen.

   Music in Swords and Darkness is atmospheric and moody, which results in it being hard to hear over the sound effects most of the time. What does reach the player's eardrums is unremarkable and generic. Among those sound effects is a needlessly loud female voice intoning the word 'pause' every time the player enters the menu, something that will cease to be endearing long before the short game is finished. While it can easily be completed in four hours or less, that will require numerous pauses for menu access, all of which bludgeon the player's ears with this word. As for the visuals, with the exception of the gratuitous opening cinematic and a few backgrounds, this is spritework that would not have strained systems in the early 90s. Beat-em-ups at that time had greater varieties of enemies to display though, and a larger gamut of locations to move through.

   I had paid no attention to Swords and Darkness prior to downloading it and starting the adventure. By the time I was done, all the repetitive thumping of the Y button I had done was starting to take a toll of my hand, and the anticlimax at the conclusion was a relief because it meant the game was over. I could have played through all three Streets of Rage titles in less time than this took, and had a whole lot more fun.