Micro Reviews: Sword Of Etheria For The PS2

Micro Reviews; everything you need to know in less than 500 words.
Reviewing: The Sword of Etheria for the playstation 2.

Game Play:
Fast, high intensity, high speed arcade style combat oriented game play. The idea is to attack enemies as fast as possible, and then chain together big combos on them using your AI controlled partners. Basically you play catch with enemies. Sounds cool on paper, but execution is sloppy to say the least.

The story revolves around some race or other that enslaved someone or other and you are one of another race or something that can use this magic thing called Etheria as a weapon, which is only supposed to be able to be used by race number one. In case you hadn’t noticed, I wasn’t really paying attention- and as anyone who’s read any of my previous reviews on games can testify to, if I’m not paying attention to the game’s story, then the story is either a) crap, or b) not really relevant to the game- In this case both.

Enemies are dull and repetitive, level design is linear and boring, the character improvement system seems to have been shoe horned in to give RPG fans something to play with (and serves no real purpose), and the graphics, while very pretty, just serve to make the game even harder to play as you can’t see what’s going on for bright flashes and weird blurs, assuming the camera is doing what is logical for once.

My Opinion:
A great concept trying to combine an RPG and ‘twitch’ gaming. Unfortunately it’s proof that a concept alone is not enough to carry a game through. I played this game for four hours straight and still couldn’t get a decent combo going. As I launched enemies to my party members, who’d launch them back only for me to miss by a mile- assuming I saw them coming at all. I don’t expect to be a master at a videogame after four hours, but I’d at least expect to have learnt the games basic mechanics properly. Maybe I’m just retarded or something, but I can’t help but feel that this game’s difficulty curve is a little too steep, and without the combos then the game just turns into a high speed hack and slash with all the variety of a funfair chip stand. Perhaps you’re supposed to complete the game and then play again, but to be honest if I don’t WANT to play a game after four hours, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to write it off as a waste of money. I think Konami must’ve pushed this one out to make up the numbers, or maybe funding and brain cells that could have made this a good game where diverted to the next MGS title.

In Closing:
Gameplay: 4/10 Good idea, executed with the grace of a pregnant hippo.
Graphics: 7/10. Pretty, but make game play that much harder.
Sound: 6/10. Allies trying to notify you if an incoming enemy are often drowned out by explosions.
Fun rating: 2/10. Maybe you’ll enjoy it if you’re naturally good at this sort of thing. But by hour 2 it had turned into a chore.
Overall: 4/10. Only buy if you like twitch gaming. And even then only for a fiver.

-Evis T.
http://www.xomba.com/user/evis_t

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