Review: Punch Entertainment kills it with Reign of Swords: Episode 2
Honestly, Reign of Swords didn’t wow me at first. The premise is what you would expect from a traditional TBS game such as Advanced Wars: you have an army, and you move each unit forward and then your opponent does the same. When your unit gets close enough to the enemy’s, you attack it; it attacks back on the next turn, and so on until you’re left with a battlefield of blood and the few battered infantrymen of the victorious army. You’ve got some units that are stronger, others that are faster; some that can shoot from a distance, and some have magical powers.
Yet as I continued playing the game, it was abundantly clear why Reign of Swords was such a powerful mobile franchise. Punch Entertainment mastered the mix. In a turn-based strategy game, developers often make the game either too easy or too hard. If you make one character (or one special ability) too powerful, then the player just has to figure out which one and he can beat any level. If you position the enemy in an overly advantageous spot, then the player gets frustrated because the level is impossible to beat. If the landscapes are too treacherous then you don’t enjoy navigating them. There are so many ways to screw up. Just one extra olive or an extra splash of grenadine, and the game doesn’t taste quite right. Fortunately, Punch Entertainment mixed this drink to perfection, and delivered a killer cocktail of characters, setting and gameplay.
Variety, variety, variety. This game was all about switching things up so that even the most attention-deficient user never got bored. With 36 different units, you always saw a different combination of friends and foes: you could play the same mission with two entirely different armies if you wanted. And then there were environmental features like castles, which protected the defender from an incoming rush of enemy units, or teleport portals, which allowed you to dart from one side of the map to the other in an effort to flank your opponent. All of these feature came together in an extremely dynamic game that will surely encapsulate any TBS fan.
Regardless, even the single player version of Reign of Swords 2 is well worth the $4.99. In fact, any TBS fan (or not) will enjoy its well-brewed gameplay and carefully constructed environments. Though it doesn’t ignite a genre, it sure will stimulate your strategic senses and inspire you to creatively master the difficult levels in a quest to defeat the elusive Lord Landower.
What we like:
- The Cocktail. The developers stitch together all of the aspects of a turn-based strategy game beautifully.
- The Variety. 32 different units, 3 worlds, 15 levels and 9 online battles.
- The Strategy. Story mode is a series of daunting yet beatable levels, and I loved the creativity and forward thinking necessary to get past each mission.
What we don’t like:
- Online play. Might be a big selling point for some, but I just can’t get into a head-to-head match that lasts 4 days.
- Lack of originality. You shouldn’t expect it, but if you did, you didn’t get it. It’s a straightforward turn-based strategy game that is simply well-crafted. No major twists or inventions in this one.