A number of commentators have mentioned the similarities between HEAVY Sword, released May 16th in the Play Store, and the seminal action platformer, Super Mario World, which developer Monster Robot Studios has acknowledged from the beginning offers a new spin on the classic, based on the question: What if Mario had a sword?
But the bigger question raised by HEAVY Sword is: Does this game even come close to the high watermark set by its legendary predecessor?
The title’s plot is very similar to that of a Mario game. The goal of its protagonist, Pike, is to save the Princess who’s been kidnapped by a bunch monsters and a big robot boss. Overall there’s not much of a thrill in the plot, and even the ending is similar to Mario. It just takes a slightly new spin by having a medieval backdrop, adding a time component and ramping up the difficulty level. The game is, in fact, really just Mario with a facelift and a sword. Instead of jumping on mushroom enemies, you off them with a sword. Like a lot of Mario games, destroying special blocks yields power-ups, but here they also offer weapon upgrades and new items. There are also hidden blocks and areas that are rife with coins and power-ups.
The upper left of the screen shows the game’s basic information a la Super Mario World. Hearts mark how many hits your character can sustain but in HEAVY Sword they also serve as a gauge of your weapon’s power.
Like a Nintendo controller of yore, there are A and B overlain on the mobile screen. Unsurprisingly, B is for attack and A for jump. In-game reminders pop up, passing on tips and tricks, such as hints on where to find hidden coins and the like. These can be as distracting as they are informative.
The game sports 24 levels, each more difficult than the last. Combine this with an already high level of challenge, and you have a game that is pretty thrilling towards the end. To sweeten the deal, each new level comes with a power-up for your sword that eventually results in your character wielding, of all things, a rather big heavy sword when you make it to the final boss battle.
After playing through the game a number of times, I can tell you that jumping away and ignoring non-essential enemies like goblins, turtles and soldiers will take you a lot further than combating each of them, since doing so only costs you time and, considering the game’s timer, will only result in killing your avatar that much quicker.
The main difficulty with this game is that the character is hard to control when jumping over the essential small blocks. If you hit jump too early, you can’t leap far enough, but if you wait too long. Eventually you’ll get the hang of it, but no doubt a lot of players are going to abandon playing HEAVY Sword on the earlier levels for just this reason. What’s worse, the fight button occasionally chokes or delays, especially when mashing. I did eventually find a way around it. However with a number of mobile action titles boasting highly responsive control schemes these days, Triniti Interactive’s KungFu Warrior comes to mind, misfires of this kind shouldn’t happen.
HEAVY Sword’s sound effects recall Japanese anime (like Sailor Moon), which is actually pretty great. However, the game’s music is annoying at best. We get the drift: this is a retro game meant to remind us of a time when digital music was still very raw, but at the end of the day, it’s just not good background music.
The game design, the graphics and the characters are all more than satisfactory though. Monster Robot Studios, however, will have to improve the game’s responsiveness and sound if they hope to gain a larger audience than the 1,000+ downloads that they have now.
And yet, as sibling and rival Luigi would no doubt attest, Mario’s are some pretty big shoes to fill. Players should be careful not to hold the title up too closely to the singularly high watermark set by the moustachioed plumber. Because Heavy Sword is a solid platformer with engaging gameplay and retro-styled graphics that are not at all hard on the eyes, it can safely be said that Mario with a sword (by way of his analogue), ultimately, wins the day, and the princess too.
Review by Abigail Azul
