I finished off the final (of three) campaign tonight, to the tune of over five hours of single player gameplay. This was some seriously fun stuff.
I was very happy to see that not only did the levels get more challenging as you go through the campaigns, but they also change things up just to screw with you. Under the barest of storyline threads, several of the final missions take away some of your chosen faction's troops and replace them with borrowed units from another faction... forcing you to reconsider your strategies.
Those last levels can be endurance tests, though. Sometimes your progress in Swords & Soldiers is measured in millimeters. I know I had at least one level go on for over 40 minutes, which is a lot of pointing and clicking.
Beyond the campaign stuff, there's regular ol' skirmish mode (where you select your faction, the AI faction, and the AI difficulty) and some sidebar minigames. The best minigame is one where you have to watch a boulder plough through the armies, hitting the A button to hop it over your own troops. That one is plain maddening to try to perfect.
I haven't even attempted the splitscreen multiplayer yet. I plan to rectify that by taking the Wii along to Origins and showing the game to Mike. This reverses a long held policy that the Wii would see no more trips, but that was mainly during the Wii's scarce days and I was afraid of breaking it without being able to find an easy replacement.
Swords & Soldiers has 25 achievements (that's what they called them) of which I have unlocked about six of them. Not many. If you get all 25, you get a secret code that will supposedly earn you a free goodie bag from the developer! I have no chance of accomplishing this.
I would love to see some kind of S&S expansion with new maps, new factions, new units, etc. Plus online play with Wii Speak support, but wouldn't that be pure fantasy. It's a shame that features we now take as rote on PS3 - like upload-to-YouTube - can never happen for WiiWare games.
This is easily the best WiiWare I've ever experienced. This would be a great DS game as well.
Leave a comment