Swords of Destiny
Why, oh why, oh why?’ is historically how retired people start their titillating letters to Points of View, complaining that Casualty is getting far too sexy or some other such drivel. Having played Swords of Destiny for a few hours you’ll be asking yourself the exact same question. Why, oh why, have I just wasted a small part of my life on this pointless sword-slashing nonsense? Answer: because you’re a fool.
The problems with Swords of Destiny are apparent from the off and almost all revolve around originality (or rather its utter lack thereof). For starters, it’s another run-of-the-mill fantasy adventure. The story is of the hackneyed ‘apprentice seeks vengeance for death of master but must also save girlfriend from evil enemy’ variety. The setting is the ‘mystical’ ancient China. The bad guys are demons, dragons and witches. Even the key theme of the game (collecting numerous special swords to fell your enemies) is barely worth caring about and borrows heavily from the Excalibur legend at times.
While all this is almost par for the course for this sort of game, the problems continue in the gameplay. Take the combat system. It’s embarrassingly simple, yet has the audacity to suggest that you can execute a ‘variety’ of combos with your character (a brooding, leather-clad ponce called Lei Yun). Essentially all you’ll be doing is holding down L1 to lock on to a baddie, then hammering the Square button until they’re dead. The focus is on keeping enemies in the air with juggling attacks, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen a million times before.
Where Swords of Destiny does attempt to be slightly different is with its so-called ‘Sword Time’. Once locked on to a target, the cursor goes red for a few seconds. Hit the bugger in that window and Lei Yun flies off in a fit of rage killing everything in sight. At least we think he does. The camera is far too slow to follow any of this ‘combo’ action.
As the stages progress the game does get harder but by then you’ll be too frozen with boredom to care. The occasional magic spell livens things up for, ooh, five seconds, but you’ll soon be back to the good old ‘L1, lock, bash the crap out of a demon’ routine. It’s swordplay at its least sexy.
Now Holby City on the other hand…
Article source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/
