Swords and Sandals

Get ready for some fight'n

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Swords and Sandals is an adventure game where you must level up your arena gladiator in order to compete for money, fame, and power. By increasing stats and buying new equipment you’ll gain the edge it takes to be victorious in battle. However, battles are still determined by a large amount of randomness, and with no save or continue features this can be large annoyance.

In Swords and Sandals you start off by creating your character. Since a majority of your character’s appearance is governed by the armor you buy and how you upgrade your strength stat, there’s not a whole lot of customization to do. Body color, hair color, hair style, and facial hair style sum it up. Luckily there are a lot of hair styles to choose from, and you can color your warrior anything from brown to blue to red- so there are still a lot of diverse character options. You will then proceed to distribute your character stats. Use the tooltip feature and mouse-over the stats to find out what they all do, as this can be important for entering into your first battles. From here you’re free to start buying armor and weapons, and duke it out in your first battle.

There are a large variety of weapons and armor to choose from, unfortunately though, you’ll probably never get to use most of it. The items are all locked by level, so even if you had the cash you couldn’t start out with high level stuff. All the armor you buy appears on your character and there are quite a few areas to upgrade, including helmet, gauntlets, greaves, breastplate, boots, shield, and more. The weapons themselves come in three categories- slashing, hacking, and bashing. They affect range and stamina (heavier weapons tire you quicker) but all have the same ranges of attack damage.

Now, for the battle system- it is turn based and I like how it’s set up, but I still think it is determined too much by random numbers. In battle you will start across the arena from your opponent. From here you can advance towards your opponent by jumping or advancing, or choose to taunt. When you are close to your opponent you can lunge in, and then start close ranged battle. From here you can use light/heavy/medium attacks, as well as shove your foe away. Everything else here is determined by the numbers. Harder attacks are more likely to be blocked, and the amount of damage done is a result of the two fighter’s strength and defense stats. For the most part things work, but I’ve been caught twice by my opponent getting a critical attack and slicing my head off in the first couple moves. The first two gladiators you fight are relatively easy (critical hits aside) but after that you’re already up against the first arena boss, who has an estimated 90% chance of killing you every time. And this is what’s disheartening about the game- once you are defeated, it’s over. No continuing, saving, trying again, or anything. You gotta remake your character and start again. I had to play about seven times before I bested the first arena boss, and then I just died from the guy that follows him. The lack of any kind of continuing option severely hurts this game in my opinion. It’s like getting killed by a boss in an rpg then having to restart the whole game.

Graphics aren’t over the top but they cover everything you need, from the town square to the gladiator arena. Warriors look nice even with the large amount of changeable parts that each is composed of. Animations are a bit stiff, but you’re somewhat limited when you have to work with a character model like this one. I like the music tracks and overall ambience of the game. The ‘swords and sandals’ opening theme is a nice touch, as well as the ‘gladiator, gladiator’ level-up track.

Swords and Sandals has a lot going for it, and if you can level your character properly there’s a lot of gameplay here too. Many items and weapons to unlock, and seven arena bosses to take on. Get ready for some frustration though if luck isn’t going your way. Please, just give us the save feature next time, and this game will be golden.

Click here to play Swords and Sandals






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