Swords & Souls: Neverseen

BE WARNED BEFORE BUYING: Awesome game, plagued with a terrible bug that the developers refuse to fix because they are worried it may "corrupt everyone's saves". If the game crashes at any point mid-save, the serialization of your save file doesn't process and the entire file is corrupted.
This means if you have played the game on and off for hundreds of hours, but during 1 session you lose power or accidentally close out of the game - your entire hundreds of hours of progress will be lost.

This bug has existed for TWO YEARS. They claimed it's a "rare bug." - No it isn't. A game crashing, power going out, a computer crashing - none of that is "rare".

They could simply back up your saves to another location, or run a two-pass serialization method that validates before overwriting - but they chose this response instead:

"I didn't find a safe way to patch up the flawed save system unfortunately, without risking losing everyone's save file. This bothers me very much I'll make sure our next game doesn't end up in the same situation."

Such a sad hill to die on, there are alternatives - they have just chosen not to implement them. If you enjoy the game, constantly back up your saves. Otherwise - not worth the trouble of having to start over again. Developer laziness should never win.

Video Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwg00-lUDJM

Written Review

Swords & Souls is a game that has you manually train each stat of your character before you go out to battle.

The gameplay loop is established very early on.
You train via minigames, go out to battle, get money, upgrade your town and gear, and repeat.

The game is all about repetition, but it rewards you with constant upgrades to keep you going.

The training mini games can be pretty fun. They all make sense with the stat that they are boosting, and although simple, can be quite fun to play.
You can also invest money into your training grounds to permanently increase the stat boosts you get from training.

In another part of town, you can spend money at a blacksmith to upgrade your current tier of weapons.

Speaking of weapons, you actually have a nice selection of melees to choose from. They all have different positives and negatives. Your ranged weapon is used as a secondary weapon in battle, as well as your spells.

Let me explain battles now. When you feel trained-enough, you head out and play the next level available to you. All of these are short turn-based encounters. Although they're not turn-based in the traditional sense.

Each character on screen takes turns to attack each other, but all of your choices need to be made in real-time. There is no pausing to think of your next move, which I found made the combat very interesting.

So by default, your character will perform a basic attack on an enemy. You can change which enemy they will target next by clicking the desired target's health bar.
You also have active skills at your disposal. One of them is a "special" attack that varies depending on what weapons you are using. You have stuff like fireballs, or a stun attack. All of these have a cooldown.

On top of that, if you left click, you can block an attack, but you only have a certain amount of charges before you have to wait for a cooldown. You can also right click for a dodge.
Battles are short, but you only have so many charges, so you actually need to strategically decide when to let yourself get hit. You might want to save your blocks for stronger enemy attacks. On top of that, if you time your block or dodge as soon as the enemy hits you, you get a free counter attack.

Your character will also occasionally trigger a critical hit, where you have to click at the right time for some massive damage.
All of this does a great job and keeping the combat feel active, and making you think on your feet.

If a battle is too tough, you can hire a mercenary from the tavern to help you out. They'll level up the more you use them, but that also means their price increases. That's why the most consistent way to progress through the game is to constantly train.

There are a few other ways to spend money in town, which help with your overall progression. You can invest in a museum that will give you a consistent income you can collect every now and again. You can also build your house to permanently increase XP gain.

Stuff like this makes you feel like you're constantly improving in some way.

Although in the end, I would only really recommend the game to people who would also play clickers. It can become a bit repetitive at a certain point. Although the training minigames were fun, they don't change THAT much, in order to justify how much you have to play them. it's definitely the kind of game that you play if you just want to take it easy and play a brainless game, maybe while you listen to music or watch a podcast.

Overall, it is fun, but I think you need to know what you're getting into before you grab it. It's got fun music, funny dialogue, and a satisfying gameplay loop (albeit being repetitive). If that sounds good to you, I recommend it!

After having played through the game up until Chapter 3: The Great Ragh'Zoul, I have reached the point where I am no longer having fun with the game. I enjoyed the beginning of the game: getting better at combat, learning monster moves for parrying, and training up my skills.

Once I learned that I could dodge and block, and counter-attack off both of them? I was sold. Every combat was seeing how many parries I could chain, learning which moves I had to dodge and not parry. I was thinking to myself, holy crap, I cannot wait for the hard fights.

Things were progressing well until I realized there would just be grinding for the sake of grinding to get bigger numbers. There were no interesting enemies or fights coming. It was just going to be spongy, number padded enemies with the same movesets. I was roped in, and you lost me.

I don't see any reason to keep playing when the mechanics of the game just frustrate me more than I enjoy it.

I am writing this review for the devs, I hope they will improve and consider some of the issues I see with this game.

Tiered Challenges

I am fine with having to grind challenges to level up, some things naturally are hard and take longer. But the way that the challenges are laid out really extends the time you have to play them (not in a good way).

For example, clearing a survive 41s challenge and missing a star to survive. The next challenge: get a 40 star combo. I did this already, why do I have to do this again?! This just artificially extends the gameplay for all the wrong reasons, you are making it a chore to complete.

If I have completed that feat in the current trial, I should be getting credit for it. Players should be able to complete multiple challenges at the same time, not having to beat them one at a time.

We already know each tier increases the star combo and no mistake time, let all of the challenges be completed within one run. You still have to grind for the harder ones, but it won't take you 20 runs to get there.

Grinding the mini-games is fine for a bit, but there is not enough variety to justify having to do them for 30 minutes just to get farm stats.

Using Skill Points

There needs to be a way to dump all your points into your skills, why do I have to click a button 20 times to do this?!

This is a game on PC, why is there no keybind or button to use all skill points at once?

Key Navigation In-Game

Why does Enter/Space not skip dialogue?! Why are there no keys to navigate to npcs in Town?!

Again, this game is on PC.

Stop using the mouse for everything when there are keys available to perform repetitive tasks. In this type of game, with the limited number of keys needed at each screen, this should be included.

Enemy Healing

The crazy enemy heals (seems to always be 1/3 of their hp) is probably the thing that kills the fun about the combat the most for me.

I am all about having to focus/prioritize an enemy in a fight, but 2 healers on the other side just makes for an annoying experience. The healers are pumping out heals every 2-3 turns and the fights become so drawn out.

You're not testing my skill, you're testing my patience.

Nothing worse than going against a big enemy and landing some counters while stacking poison, only to have them heal 600,000hp and remove all debuffs?!

That is unfair and unfun.

Combat

After awhile, the fights really just become throwing tons of spongy monsters and healers at you. For the build I was playing, there were not many options to deal enough AOE damage.

The thing that sucks the most about that though, the game has a great combat system.

I enjoy having to time parries, manage stuns/blocks/dodges, and slowly taking down big enemies with poison/spells. I see such potential for combat in this game. Enemies using combos of unblockable/undodgeable attacks, switching sides on you, forcing you to dodge/parry at the right times, leaving only a time window to punish them.

I see all the pieces there already, but the current gameplay loop just doesn't do it for me.

If I miss dodging/block a single poison spell... I just restart the fight since I won't be able to do damage fast enough against healers and damage dealers at the same time before poison kills me.

Verdict

I would not recommend this game.

There is not enough attention to the menus/controls for PC, the grinding takes too long, and the combat loses its appeal.

If the grind does not reward the player with good combat or items, there's no reason to play.