OMG Nintendo

These last three weeks on the WiiWare front have been extremely interesting, as they have all seen the release of at least one "A List" level title.

It started with the double-team of Adventure Island and Bubble Bobble Plus!, followed by FFIV: The After Years the next week. While not all of those games have lived up to their expectations, it is nice to see a steady flow of titles that people could be interested in playing. Now another WiiWare title that looks to have actual effort put into it, Ronimo Game's Swords & Soldiers, joins the fray.

Swords & Soldiers is a colorful and comedic 2D Strategy Game where you send your armies of Vikings, Aztecs or Chinese off to battle for gold, victory, and, in the Viking's case at least, awesome barbeque. This is accomplished by gathering gold to upgrade your soldiers and magic abilities enough that you can overrun the enemy's forces. Graphically, Swords & Soldiers is a very eye-catching game. Each unit type has enough personality to their simple animations to make them fun to watch. The dialogue will not win any awards, but it is good for the occasional chuckle.

Of course, this is a Strategy Game and a major factor of one is being able to move between units quickly and efficiently. This factor can make or break the experience and while Swords & Soldiers is not completely broken, it does wobble on its feet disturbingly often. Simplicity is the name of the game here, as Swords & Soldiers is obviously trying to draw in people who would normally not play Strategy Games. Creating new units and magic is as easy as navigating a single drop down menu. Using those units and magical abilities, once they are ready, is as equally simple as clicking on their icon at the top of the screen.

A bit of an unintentional stumbling block, however, is that the controls are a little too simplified. One of the bigger problems is, once you create a unit, you have very little control over it.  You can support it with healing/defense spells, attack enemy units in front of it with offensive spells, or alter which route it takes at path splits.  You cannot tell it to wait for back-up or focus on defense, which results in your units being very thinly spread out across the stage.

This brings to light a second problem with the controls: There is no way to quickly move between units at the front and units at the rear. You have to manually scroll the screen across the battle field the whole time. This can lead to frustrating situations like when you finally get a spell that will speed up your back units: By the time you scroll back and use the spell, your front units are dead before you can return to them. As a result, most stages boil down to just clicking on unit icons to summon more and more soldiers, letting them take their own sweet time to make it to the enemy. You can occasionally support the units already engaged in battle with spells, but this can grow tedious quickly.

The three campaigns are available from the start but, for the most part, they are functionally identical. While each of the three groups have unique spells and units with special abilities, the previously mentioned problems with organizing your units means their differences never really get a chance to stand out.

The beginning of the Aztec's campaign is worth special note though. However, that is only because the gimmick of the initial stages makes for a much higher level of difficulty than the others. There is the occasional mini-game you can unlock and the multiplayer seems functional. Again, however, the lack of organizational abilities makes playing against another person no different than playing against the computer.

All in all, Swords & Soldiers is a very good looking, somewhat amusing attempt to make a more casual-friendly Strategy Game. Unfortunately, its inability to really let you control your troops dooms it from truly being the "A List" title it wants to be.