Half Sword is a medieval combat game being developed by Half Sword Games, an independent developer based in Georgia, USA. The game's hook is its unique combat mechanics, which maps swings to the player's mouse and gives them independent control over their hands, allowing the player to target specific areas on enemies. In short, a modern take on Die by the Sword. Oh, and it's also incredibly gory.
Half Sword currently exists as an experimental demo consisting of a survival mode where the player wanders around a darkened arena, fighting off increasingly challenging enemies while collecting weapons and armor until they are killed. It can be downloaded on Steam
. Being so early in development, Half Sword will likely change rapidly over the future as the developers add new features and patch out bugs.
This game provides examples of:
- Armor Is Useless: Averted. Helmets and plates will block bladed weapons, though they won't protect from the knockback caused by the blunt force impact. When up against armored enemies, it's best to aim for the unprotected parts of their bodies.
- Critical Existence Failure: Averted. Enemies won't die unless they suffer a properly fatal blow or bleed out. This means that yes, they will writhe on the ground crying out in pain with horrific injuries unless you put them out of their misery.
- Gorn: Good Lord. Limbs can be amputated in multiple places, slashes can tear out huge chunks of flesh, exposing ribs and bones, enemies can be bisected in multiple ways horizontally and vertically complete with spilling intestines, and bodies create huge, realistic pools of blood.
- Literal Disarming: One of the easiest ways to put an enemy out of commission is to chop their hand or arm off. If they don't have a second weapon in their off-hand, or a backup ready on their waist, they'll likely turn tail and run away.
- Lodged-Blade Recycling: If an enemy manages to lodge their knife in your body, you can actually pull it out and wield it.
- Off with His Head!: Behead an enemy and you can watch their body flail around before it crumples to the ground, neck spurting out blood like a fountain.
- Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Enemies and the player spill a LOT of blood when they get hit, but unlike the player they can actually bleed to death. If you survive getting hit enough times over a run, you would have likely spilled MUCH more blood than exists in the human body by the time you actually die.
- Regenerating Health: In lieu of health kits, the player can recover from non-fatal (i.e. dismembering) hits by staying out of combat for a little while.
- Rocket-Tag Gameplay: One good hit is often all it takes to incapacitate an enemy. The same applies to the player, so the gist of the combat is to get a single good hit in before the enemy does it to you.
- Rogue Like: The survival arena in the demo starts you off with nothing besides a pair of underwear. You have to collect clothes and weapons as you progress, and if you die, you start off again with absolutely nothing.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: If you succeed in disarming an enemy and they're still able to walk, they may very well book it out of there.
- Sinister Scythe: The black-clad foes that appear as minibosses in the survival arena carry scythes. Not only do they have excellent reach, these scythes are extremely good at slicing people in half.
- Some Dexterity Required: The basic controls are fairly in depth but easy to grasp once you understand them: left mouse button prepares a swing (or a right hand weapon), right mouse button prepares a block (or a left hand weapon), mouse aim carries out the actual swing, and you have keys for thrusting or holstering weapons. The real difficulty is in keeping track of your weapon to make sure you don't swing short, or with long weapons like spears and scythes swing too far and hit your enemy with the shaft.
- Wreaking Havok: The physics engine ties heavily into the swordplay and character animations, as the speed of swings factor into whether blows chop off limbs, induce knockback, or are blocked by other objects and weapons. This can result in situations where your weapon gets stuck behind your character's leg, or a bug resulting from pulling out a weapon from a weapon rack sending the weapon rack flying onto you, killing you instantly.
