Swords & Soldiers: This Wii Ware Title is THE $#!*!

The video gaming equivalent to the question “if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a noise” roughly translates to “if an awesome game comes out and nobody plays it, is it any good?”. As successful as the Wii is with the non-gamers, the problem that this creates for people looking for a game worth playing is a giant amount of shovel-ware targeted towards the larger, uninformed purchasing public. It’s hard to go into a GameStop or Best Buy and navigate the racks of Wii titles without giving up from the barrage of cooking, pet raising and brain-banging shovel ware on the shelves. For every good game that’s released on the Wii, there seems to be about 150 crappy party games  and awesome games get lost in the avalanche of garbage all the time. So when Nintendo released their Wii Ware program for independent studios to take part in, this same ratio seemed to only make a digital translation. To date, the only game that I had downloaded from Wii Ware and enjoyed was the incredible little treat of a game called Lost Winds.

Enter Romino Games this past June with their comedic side-scrolling strategy game Swords & Soldiers! Romino Games is a young developer, formed in late 2007, by the original creators of the fun platformer “de Blob”, released on the Wii by THQ this past spring. In Swords & Soldiers, Romino has taken their comedically original approach to normal gaming genres and tackled the strategy, resource building game. When I was offered the chance to download the title a few days ago I was skeptical at first (especially not being an avid strategy gamer and being double weary of Wii (shovel)Ware) but I figured “hey, they’re sending me the game for free and if it sucks, I’ll just delete it!”

Wait. Is that an Aztec statue shooting lazers at Vikings? HOLY $H!*! BEST GAME EVER!?!?

Well, the game doesn’t suck. In fact, Swords & Soldiers is completely hilarious and awesome. Romino made one huge mistake: I would have totally paid for this game! If you are a PSP gamer who loves Patapon, you should have downloaded this game YESTERDAY. If you’re a non PSP gamer who is interested in Patapon but have a Wii, Swords & Soldiers is the perfect game for you. I love Patapon. It’s a fun side scrolling strategy game and I know Swords & Soldiers is going to get compared to it (and possibly the classic game from my childhood Lemmings) a lot. But at the end of the day, Patapon has a rhythm and RPG element to it while Swords & Soldiers plays more as a straight forward resource building strategy game.

And the game is hilarious. In story mode, the goal of the game is to chase your enemy across the globe and wipe them off the face of the map. You start out playing as a Viking horde but can jump ahead to play as Asian forces or an Aztec army. Each group comes with specific types of warriors, gathers and magicians that you take with you on your globe conquering pursuits. The characters are depicted in a loud, comic strip-style and the instructional dialogue is informative and hilarious (and gets more ridiculous as the storylines get further and further along and you add more and more ridiculous soldiers). Remember when Gilmore went and visited the set of The Deadliest Warrior and they were wondering who would win in a fight between William Wallace and Shaka Zulu? With Swords & Soldiers, players can play out those battles in ridiculous fashion as they toss stink bombs, ice hammers and spells at each other. But as cartoony as the game is, hardcore strategy fans can find satisfaction in the mass amounts of choices you have to tackle each scenario.

When Thor talks, you listen! “More gold, Gold Diggers!” Yes, that IS their character name.

There is a lot to do in this very cleanly constructed game. The on screen menu is super simple to navigate and the icons are obvious and easy to select quickly in the heat of battle without taking away any strategic depth. You WILL find yourself using all of your abilities and options pretty evenly in order to win. You can upgrade soldiers, heal your troops and pick various paths for them to follow as they move from left to right to pillage  resources, defeat the enemy and destroy their stronghold. The variations in strategy shouldn’t intimidate you though. Swords & Soldiers is extremely easy and quick to learn. The game adds new abilities at a friendly pace and the challenges grow steadily but never to a point of frustrating the player too much.

I remember having trouble crossing the desert in the original Patapon because of my inability to hit the right rhythms. It was more frustrating for me than fun. Playing through Swords & Soldiers, with the fluid ease provided by the Wii remote, I never experienced anything close to that. If my army was defeated, the battles were always quick and fun enough for me to feel good about clicking to get right back in there and try it another way. In fact, Swords & Soldiers in the epitome of what I think the Wii does better than the other two systems. If you want to spend all day beating through a game, you’ll never get bored of Swords & Soldiers. But if you just want to pick up and play it for 10 minutes, it has that appeal as well. You never  feel like you’re NOT accomplishing something, no matter how long you play it.

So much global genocide… so little time.

Which brings us to some features that I found additionally exciting about the game. The first is achievements. You can always go back and play previous missions and depending on how you accomplish certain tasks, you can unlock different game elements. Even though there are no gamer points to be had on the Wii, this feature definitely appealed to the completion obsessed nature of myself and most of my gaming friends.

Another awesome feature is split screen versus mode. Now, while Laura wasn’t feeling the game while she watched me play it (it IS pretty loud, in your face and ridiculous), I can see how having a friend over for a battle to see who can destroy each other’s forces and castles can achieve a Mario Kart level of fun and competitiveness. The character animations are flashy and entertaining to watch (and listen to… unless you’re Laura) but never get too complicated or distracting. You can clearly see what’s going on at all times and it gives you just enough ridiculous attitude to fuel any trash talking with your friend. When you see a Native American tribesman get tossed across the screen by a swipe from a Solar-powered leopard god… it’s pretty damn funny (unless your the tomahawk wielding Native American who went up against the stone statue come to life)!

Skeleton Tribesmen versus Ice Vikings? That’s an achievement in its own right!

The final feature I really enjoyed was a type of survival mode that you unlock by proceeding through the game. This mode tasks players with keeping a single soldier alive as they traverse across a battlefield littered with enemies. The player is only given a limited amount of spells, mana and upgrades to spend and is graded on how far their little warrior can go before being ultimately killed. It provides a fun quick challenge that breaks up the intensity of the story and versus modes pretty well.

Someone’s gonna complain about the political correctness of this one…

So there you have it: my unabashed love letter review to the awesome guys at Romino and their Wii Ware game Swords & Soldiers. I’m not sure that you can play versus mode online with friends but that would be an incredible incentive to getting all of you to get your own copy. Regardless, if you own a Wii and are looking for something fun to play while you wait for another game featuring Mario, Link or Samus, Swords & Soldiers is absolutely a must buy download. It offers various levels of player investment appealing to everyone from passive strategy gamers to hardcore completion-ists and is also an entertaining way to completely butcher a history lesson with it’s irreverently inaccurate (and insulting?) depictions of legendary armies. If you need justification for keeping your Wii in the living room, Swords & Soldiers comes highly recommended. I was both completely surprised and blown away.

“Aztec Zombie Horde… ATTACK!”