En Garde!

I really want to like this game more than I do. The overall premise is fun and I love the personality they infuse it with. However, the gameplay is... like holding the sharp end of the sword: usable and exciting but once you squeeze too hard it's just pain. You can get most of the way into the game with it being light and fun but then they introduce a terrible mechanic: failing to correctly respond to attacks regenerates stance. The first time this "perfecting" mechanic shows up it's not so bad and the game eases you into handling multiple enemies at once with it via environmental interactions. Everything is looking good until you get close to the end of the game. Fights start to either have no environmental help or throw *tons* of these enemies at you at once. Instead of the combat continuing to fun and exciting (channeling a swinging from the chandelier mentality) it devolves into drudgery as combat can take forever, any mistakes are severely punished, and all of that creativity i...

Good game with interesting mechanics but gets boring quickly.

Be mindful when buying this for a child as the protagonist is a lesbian in love with her pirate friend. I don't mind, but you might have to explain a thing or two to your kid xD Apart from that, very nice fencing / fighting / platforming game. I really like the characters and the over-the-top style. Graphics are great, so is the music. Good voice acting and generally nice story arcs for 4 episodes you get to play.

En Garde! - A game about rapier riposting! A decent funny story with great dialogue, great visuals and tight combat gameplay. The great quirk with this game is the fact that you can play dirty by kicking obstacles to your enemies, kick them off ledges, down them with soup cauldrons and look like a stylish swordsmaster whilst doing it. While the game is easy to pick up, it's quite hard to master, especially on the higher difficulties. Regardless, I found En Garde! to be a great twist on the attack counter dodge mechanics.

Easy to learn, easy to enjoy. Not much of a game (a regular playthrough was 5 hours, I expect to 100% it below 20) but what's there is good.

I like it, although it's too big for being a "proof of concept" but also too short to be a [i] real [/i] game.

Feels unfinished, almost like this is the beta release and not the full game. From character's mouths not moving for dialogue, the 'pop in' at the start of every level and the unpolished feeling of all the areas too (it always takes a second to realise where you're supposed to go, nothing is 'designed' to lead your attention or direct you down a path*) and A LOT of unresponsive control issues. I hope we get an En Garde! 2 because the mechanics are solid, the combat is great and the visuals are... Passable? It feels very Fortnite-esc, needs more stylisation to truly be it's own thing. Do I recommend the game? Yes, if you want to pull off Puss In Boots fight scenes where you throw a bucket on a lackey's head, knock out everyone else, go back to the original lackey who has JUST managed to get the bucket off and you kick them into a rack of weapons that crushes them to cartoon death. Do I recommend the game for $30 (sheep land money)? No, it's a steam sale game. But a DECENT sale game,...

[h1]7/10[/h1] Just a fun and lighthearted game. I love the LOD effect where far away objects become more stylized and cartoonishly blobby. The combat is solid. Parrying, dodging and using the environment are all essential. The parkour is very basic but fun nonetheless.

It turns the Souls Like formula into a very fun incredible manifestation of swashbuckling.

To start with, I fully recommend this game if you can get it for like 50% off, otherwise even if you go for 100% there's not much content and the speedrun scene doesn't seem as big as you'd expect for a game like this (or at least when I looked there hadn't been a new world record in over a year). If you are just here for "Is the game good or bad?" It's good and you can stop reading now. A short rambly essay: Me: I don't normally leave reviews outside of the Steam Awards at the end of the year or if the game truly stood out to me as maybe the best game I've played all year or something. In this case this game is NOT that. It's good and I recommend it but I felt compelled to write a review as this game feels like it was an answer to questions I'd already been wondering to myself regarding action games and I couldn't sleep without writing my thoughts down somewhere. I cannot promise to be particularly coherent but I needed to discuss the concept of environmental interactions in action/...