Swords & Soldiers is a Real-Time Strategy game, first released for WiiWare in 2009. It then received an HD rerelease, which was ported to PS3 and for PC through Steam in 2010, to iOS in 2011, to Wii U in 2014 and to Nintendo Switch in 2019. It also received a sequel, Swords & Soldiers II, first on Wii U in 2015, and then for PC and PS4 in 2018 and for Switch in 2019.
In the first game, the Vikings, the Aztecs, and the Chinese are fighting over a giant pepper for various reasons. The sequel replaced the latter two factions with Persians and demons, but the core premise remains unchanged: Get gold, buy troops, get them safely to the other side, and destroy their base before the same happens to you. Both games feature a single-player campaign for each of their factions, as well as the skirmish and multiplayer modes.
Swords and Soldiers provides examples of the following tropes:
- Action Bomb: Some of the demon troops are suicide bombers.
- Alliterative Title
- Arrows on Fire: Chinese archers only ever fire arrows that are set alight.
- Dem Bones: The Aztec priests can send out a ton of skeletons as their basic fodder.
- Glass Cannon: Most Aztec soldiers have very low health, but they make up for it at their low cost.
- Horny Vikings: Given the game's cartoony aesthetics, all the Vikings are drawn with very conventional horned helmets.
- An Ice Person: Vikings possess ice spells, such as a whole blizzard in the sequel.
- Inexplicable Treasure Chests: You get treasure from such chests during the campaign.
- Magic Carpet: Persians in the sequel possess carpet riders as one of their elite units since flight makes them immune to melee.
- Mind Control: The Aztecs can control the enemy unit to fight for them.
- Monkey King Lite: In the first game, the Chinese have ninja monkeys designed in this style as their elite troops.
- Necromancer: The Aztec priests, capable of raising the dead as combat-ready skeletons.
- One-Hit KO: Zen masters can kill every unit in one attack, however, they can only attack one unit at a time and they take a while to finish the attack, so try to overwhelm them with cheap units when playing against them.
- Our Genies Are Different: Sequel's Persians have cannons that fire djinni's to anywhere on the map.
- Royal Brat: The Chinese emperor is a small child who would rather play with his toys rather than manage his army.
- Shock and Awe: Vikings possess lightning spells.
- Worker Unit: In the first game, any player could build up to ten.
- Zerg Rush: In both games, Vikings are considered the easiest faction to play as because their basic warriors are capable enough to win through constantly spamming them, and expending all mana on healing them.
- The sequel's demons are the ultimate quantity-over-quality faction, who are capable of building all units faster than the others, at the expense of their weakness.
