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About Die By The Sword - PC
Review Another damsel in distress, another wicked warlock bent on world conquest, and another hapless hero with nothing but the sword in his hand and the shirt on his back - you've heard it before. But Die by the Sword, a 3D third-person action game, goes well beyond its almost admirably typical premise to deliver a visually stunning, terribly challenging, and often awe-inspiring dungeon hack, though one not without its fair share of shortcomings. Die by the Sword threatens to introduce a revolutionary new play mechanic. Its technology is such that you are granted complete control over the hero's sword arm. Using a mouse or numeric keypad, you can order Enric to swipe his sword from point to point in any direction, and his momentum will determine how much damage he inflicts. At first glance you might guess that this system allows for a near-infinite variety of attacks, just like the box says. On closer inspection, though, you realize that there is in fact a proper way to do things. More often than not, you'll be swinging right to left and stepping into the swing in order to add more bite. This effective attack looks basic enough when performed onscreen, but demands you quickly push as many as four buttons in sequence on the keypad. Going for fancier attacks just doesn't pay off, though once in a while you might get lucky. So in the end, Die by the Sword's intriguing control method just makes it a pain to accomplish what a competent swordsman like Enric should be able to do with little effort. While a simplified arcade mode exists, allowing you to perform most types of moves at the touch of a button, it's disappointing to use knowing that a less restrictive, if more convoluted, control scheme is available. Aside from swinging your sword around, you can perform various functions typical of this type of game including sidestepping, jumping, crouching, and climbing. Unlike the fighting mechanics, moving Enric around is relatively straightforward and effective. Of course, frolicking around won't save you from a couple of angry man-sized mantises; you'll spend most of your time with Die by the Sword trying to fight against decidedly unfair odds, and most of that time will be spent dying and starting from the previous autosave. Though Die by the Sword promises supreme precision control over your various fighting moves, in practice your best bet is to run like a chicken and try to go for cheap shots when the enemy isn't looking. Defending with your shield is almost impossible, and even if you master the control, you'll still die half the time just because the enemy hops up and kind of runs into you with his ax, knocks you down, and then kills you dead as you clamber to your feet. In other words, hit detection and damage infliction often feel just plain wrong or unfair, if not simply inconsistent. Meanwhile, a recklessly panning and sweeping camera angle won't make your life any easier, though you can toggle through a few different perspectives to best suit the situation. With three fighters onscreen and one wacky camera, you'd best be armed with a state-of-the-art PC with a wicked-fast 3D accelerator if you hope to squeeze a decent frame rate out of this game. Even the minimum detail setting will force a lower-end Pentium to its proverbial knees. With enough horses under the hood, though, Die by the Sword is graphically amazing. You'll fight your way through a number of fantastic yet hauntingly realistic settings including a massive set of gears, a subterranean Dwarven steelworks, an ancient temple teeming with traps, and an ominous swamp. Along the way you'll have to fend off scores of monsters including boarlike Orcs, doglike Kobolds, froglike Trogs, and more. None of these enemies is terribly original, but they look real enough in Die by the Sword to be interesting, if not fearsome. The boorish chain mail-clad hero Enric and all his foes are fully three-dimensional and look great as they run about trying to slice one another's hea
