En Garde! Review – A Short But Satisfying Thrust
Few things in gaming are better than knowing that your character looks awesome. Devil May Cry, Bulletstorm, and Bayonetta are all games that let you constantly do cool things, and look awesome as you do so. Sometimes that’s pulling off an incredible combo that lasts longer than a first love, and sometimes that’s sliding into an enemy before energy-lashing them into a man-eating plant. They’re different, but the sense of sheer cool they offer are the same thing, and that’s the exact same space that En Garde! is playing in.
Playing as the ever-graceful and badass swashbuckler Adalia de Volador, you have to take down the evil Count-Duke and stop his nefarious plans at every step. We say nefarious, but the dude outlaws make fun of him at one point, so it’s mostly a battle against his fragile ego. Still, it involves using your sword, so we’re counting it.
While you’ll mostly be using your sword to actually take the fight to the various idiot minions of the Count-Duke, it’s actually only the finishing blow for many fights. Instead, Adalia specialises in on-the-fly improv fighting, which basically means that every mug, bucket, box, weapon rack, and pot of soup is fair game when it comes to fighting off the hordes of enemies.
The first few enemies you fight can be taken down with a flurry of your sword in their direction, but each new enemy you meet brings new challenges. Take the Grenadiers, for example, who delight in yeeting bombs at you from afar, and will run away from every sword attack you throw. You’ll instead need to throw something at them – ideally a lantern to set their backpack full of explosives ablaze – before you can take them out. Of course, if you do throw a lantern at them, they’ll very rapidly become a weapon of
Read more on thesixthaxis.com
