A king needs your help to find a lost treasure, so you must recruit heroes and equip them with armor, weapons, and swag and send them out on adventures to get more stuff.  All with neat 16-bit style pixel graphics and humor.  Swag and Sorcery is available to download on mobile devices and PC, but reviewed on iPad here.

The kingdom is viewed in a top down perspective and you tap on buildings to do things.  The guild lets you hire heroes.  The stable sends them off on adventures.  The church heals them, the training ground levels them up, and there are stores where you can buy weapons and armor.  But it all costs coins, which you get by going on adventures.

When you send your heroes off on an adventure, they’ll autoscroll left to right through various locations, nabbing loot and defeating monsters on their own.  Later on you can cast spells to help, and if the going gets too tough you can send them back, but you won’t get to keep everything unless you finish the adventure.  Much later you can send out up to three parties on adventures, so there’s a lot to keep up with.  Use the gold and materials you get on adventures to heal and equip your heroes with better stuff so you can complete missions.

Unfortunately the learning curve is pretty steep, and the enemies get tough pretty fast.  And if you run out of coins to heal, it makes it very hard to build yourself back up.  For this reason I had a hard time staying interested in the gameplay, which is also a bit repetitive and lacks interaction.  Their attempt at humor also falls flat most of the time, but I did like the 16-bit pixel graphics at least.

Kid Factor:

Your heroes can swing weapons and cast spells at monsters, but defeated characters just fall over and disappear.  I didn’t find any in-game purchases, which is a nice change for a mobile game.  Reading skill is a must for the text, and younger gamers may find it too difficult.

Tags: Game Reviews