The combat isn’t as tight as it could be, the weapons mechanics are uninteresting, and it ultimately feels like an incomplete game. Even with friends it doesn’t have the staying power as the much simpler Nidhogg and its sequel. Griefhelm is fun for a few hours, but it wears thin. Screenshot: GriefhelmĪnd that’s where I stand on it. Griefhelm may improve in the future, but it really just needs more time in the oven. The developer has laid out a roadmap for post release plans, but it’s to add features that should have been baked into the version 1.0 release. If it were in Early Access I would praise it for its potential, and talk about its future. Griefhelm does not feel like a complete game. Levels are a smattering of battlefields on beaches, fields, campsites-but almost always gray and hazy. But Griefhelm is only dreary, and rarely interesting. Even the music in the overworld reminds me of the dream-like music you sometimes hear in that game’s soundtrack. Screenshot: GriefhelmĪ lot of the art in Griefhelm reminds me a bit of Demon’s Souls. The thought of going through all of those matches again with Griefhelm’s dreary environments is almost too much to bear. You have a limited number of lives, and once you’ve exhausted all of them, you lose all of your progress, and must start over, something that is daunting if you fail near the end of a long run. You go across an overworld map, choosing battles, fighting opponents, and collecting gear and perks as you go along. A little poke to the leg can sever it and cause your opponent to go flying-with the same force as if you came down on their head with a war hammer after taking a running leap.Ĭampaign mode is probably Griefhelm’s best feature, but even that feels incomplete. Weapons don’t really have weight, even though they hit an enemy with inordinate force. Unfortunately, none of them really feel that much different than the starting long sword. There are multiple weapons to get ahold of in Griefhelm. It turns out it’s more about timing than wielding the weaponry effectively. It’s possible, I’m sure, with practice to master this swordplay, but Griefhelm’s controls feel loose and imprecise. It tries very hard to be a tight, skill-based affair-but many fights are settled with lucky blows. You automatically block an incoming attack if it matches with the attacker’s stance. You can swing your sword, turn around, jump, and change between high, middle, and low stance. Griefhelm is recommended to be played with a gamepad, so I played it on my Xbox controller. But tug of war isn’t Griefhelm’s only mode-there are skirmish and horde modes as well. There’s a slight twist on the end, though-once you or your opponent is forced back to their end point, it enters into a last stand mode for that person, meaning death will instantly end the game if the person on their last life-signified by appearing to be on fire-is defeated, even if they drove their opponent back several screens. You spar with an opponent, and each defeat of that opponent allows you to run forward. There’s a tug of war game mode that closely matches Nidhogg, without the level hazards. Griefhelm is a side-scrolling action game where you can play solo against bots or join up to three friends to fight in player versus player combat, or through a campaign that sees you fighting in multiple different scenarios. I bring up Nidhogg and its sequel specifically because Griefhelm feels like a clone of those games, but with its own twist on the subgenre, and with a little more meat on its bones.
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