Swords & Soldiers (Wii) - Let's Play 1001 Games - Episode 683
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I'm Gaming Jay: Youtube gamer, let's player, fan of retro games, and determined optimist... Join me in this series while I try out EACH of the video games in the book 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE, before I die. The game review for each game will focus on the question of whether you MUST play this game before you die. But to be honest, the game review parts are just for fun, and are not meant to be definitive, in depth reviews; this series is more about the YouTube gamer journey itself. From Mario games to the Halo series, from arcade games to Commodore 64, PC games to the NES and Sega Genesis, Playstation to the Xbox, let's play those classic retro games that we grew up with, have fond memories of, or heard of but never got a chance to try! And with that said, the game review for today is...
Swords & Soldiers
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_%26_Soldiers
Swords & Soldiers is a 2D sidescrolling real-time strategy game by Ronimo Games. It was released in Europe on May 15, 2009,[2] and in North America on June 8, 2009.[3] It is available for Windows,[4] Mac OS X, Linux, Android, Wii, PlayStation 3, iOS, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch. Two Tribes released Swords & Soldiers on the Wii U eShop, which was released in North America and Europe on May 22, 2014.[5]
A sequel, Swords & Soldiers II, was released on the Wii U eShop in May 2015. In June 2018, Ronimo Games started a Kickstarter project for a re-release, titled Swords & Soldiers II: Shawarmageddon.
Swords & Soldiers began development after THQ acquired the rights to its first game de Blob. While it was originally intended to be a flash game, the developers saw potential in the title and moved it to the WiiWare service. The development team was initially made up by seven developers and a "varying amount of interns", and the team used the offices of Dutch Game Garden to develop the game. Swords & Soldiers began as simply a split-screen multiplayer game featuring only the Aztecs and the Vikings. The developers validated this decision using arguments such as them not being sure how well WiiWare games sell, that the project was mostly to show that they could develop a game from point A to point Z, that the multiplayer component was one of the strongest features of the game, and that beginning with multiplayer allows the developers to balance the game right away. The single player mode was added after the developers implemented a single player tutorial, which they found fun. While they intended to only put a small amount of single player content, they ended up adding 30 campaign levels, additional challenge modes, achievements, and other features. They used extensive play testing to ensure that the game, especially the single player mode, had a proper difficulty curve and that the gameplay is not complicated. They attempted to utilize it to test the game's balance, but found that testers took too long with strategies to use it accurately with testing factions' strengths. The developers cited the play testers for helping them make it as good as it is and for creating a fan following on the Internet.[7] Several features of the game were implemented late in the development process, including the ability to change the game's pace. A major addition was added balance, which they realized was necessary after discovering that the balance was very poor in spite of believing it to be much better initially.
The developers cited the real-time strategy game StarCraft as a strong inspiration, citing in particular its use of factions as something that made it particularly more inspiring than other games in the genre. They add that the quality of StarCraft's factions comes from both the gameplay and their visual appearances. This caused them to focus on having three different factions that played differently from each other. They intended to make sure that every unit and spell was unique as well as different abilities for each faction such as how each one collects mana. The first faction, the Vikings, simply have to buy an upgrade, intending to make the Vikings the most accessible class. The Aztecs sacrifice a unit to turn its health into mana, which the developers state they did so to add "playful cruelty" to this faction. The Chinese faction has to build a Buddha statue, which generates mana until it is destroyed, requiring players to protect it. The developers intended to make the Chinese faction more complex than the other two.