Sword of Sodan - Amiga
I fired up Antstream and decided to pick something random from the list… and ended up with Sword of Sodan! I'm fairly sure I played it back in the day and enjoyed it, but I don't remember it particularly. Let's have a look…
Blimey! What great graphics it has for an Amiga game from 1988. Chunky, huge sprites with lots of detail and colour. It looks awesome. You can also choose a male or female character at the start, which is nice. They seemed to play the same to me but it's good to have a choice. And there's some nice digitised speech, although the guy sounds surprisingly bored for someone narrating a swords and sorcery epic where people don't like to wear much clothing.
You then start the game and set about swinging your sword at the giant enemy sprites and walking slowly from the left to the right.
Good lord. The actual gameplay bit is crap. You swing your sword a bit and duck occasionally. There's lots of grunting. The enemies bunch up and poke back with spears. Sometimes they hit you. It takes lots of hits to kill anyone. It's really, really dull.
It's not even well designed. On the very first level, if you back your enemies up far enough to the right they all disappear into a doorway and you can't see any of them anymore. You know they're still there because of all the grunting but you can't see them.
Level two is like level one, except with spikes coming out if the floor. Because everyone loves that. They damage you, but annoyingly they don't seem to hurt anyone else, so you don't even have the satisfaction of using the enemies traps against them.
Apparently if you play long enough you get to a monster you can ride on. I didn't get that far. This is a bad game. But hey, it looks good, right? So that's a 2 I think; but I can't recommend it unfortunately.
2/5