Can you make an RTS for consoles? Yes, of course you can. It'll just be a little lite to account for having to support inputs from a controller.
Can you make an RTS for the Nintendo Wii? Well, now you're just being silly. That'll be a right pain in the arse to get up and runni-oh, Swords & Soldiers, no, I've not heard of that one at all. Real-Time Strategy, you say? Doesn't look it, but let's see...
Fun Times
Swords & Soldiers is the kind of game that you forget you own, and when you see it in your Steam library, you forget why you own it. Its generic title gives no indication of what it's about, and it looks like an HD version of a mobile game, if I'm honest, but that's to be expected when I am indeed playing Swords & Soldiers HD, a port of a Nintendo Wii downloadable.
Firing it up, I head to a campaign mode that features our three playable factions, the Vikings, Aztecs, and Chinese, and what follows is all completely unexpected.
What you're seeing is a 2D sidescrolling RTS staring cash-strapped Vikings trying to hold a BBQ. Our first unit is a gold miner whose sole duty is to go back and forth between our base and the nearest mine, and she does so on complete autopilot.
The nature of controlling everything with a Wiimote means much of Swords & Soldiers runs on its own, allowing you to focus on supporting your units with magical abilities and easily buying more units when things get hairy.
The icons at the top of the screen are things you can buy, units with gold and magic with mana. Buying anything will freeze that button for a short period of time, so you can't stack up a load to be bought at once, sadly, and when units spawn in, they immediately start marching left to right to make their way down the stage towards the enemy.
Day turns to night, and that light pillar in the dead of the cold winter night is my healing ability, which regenerates some health for my berserker, or anything else I choose to target. One unit at a time, though all these units and abilities have upgrades that are slowly unlocked through the campaign.
Night turns to day and we're still fighting, but with only one target left to defeat, victory will soon be ours.
Our story progresses in the only sensible way: our meat supplier is under attack. At his disposal, which means at our disposal, is a new unit type in the form of the axe chucker. A ranged unit, they'll be able to chip away at the opposition unit's health bars before being smashed in the face.
Like many RTS games, Swords & Soldiers is satisfying to fling a load of units out just to watch the carnage unfold. It's a little trickier to know for sure when a given unit will get to where you need them to be but get there they will, and you have to do little more than keep a watchful eye over them, healing them up if need be, buying support if the ranks are thinned.
It's a sort of chill little game, but one that no doubt has some challenges lined up for us to face.
Some stages feature branching paths for your warriors to wander down. You can imagine how they come into play easily enough: one route is going to be harder but more rewarding than the other, which do you take?
This level was particularly annoying because there were no gold mines to regenerate resources, so you had to spend what you had wisely. I elected to buy some upgrades to my mana regeneration so that I could keep sending lightning strikes down from the skies, making it much easier for my limited number of berserkers to make progress and hoover up the treasure chests along the way.
It's not just infighting amongst Vikings that we've got to worry about, as our campaign takes us towards Chinese territory, where units include teleporting monkeys. When units can't turn around and walk back to defend their base, teleporting monkeys start to sound quite concerning.
Still, by this point in Swords & Soldiers, I had the gist of the gameplay down, and the rest was simply a case of using new units to their strengths or finding a solution to whatever puzzle lay before me.
When it was time to face the Aztecs, that puzzle was rather large...
Frustrations
I already forget its name, but this brute was an actual Aztec unit, meaning that when I eventually defeated one, at considerable cost to my own forces and resources, it would only be a matter of time before another one was created and sent towards my base.
That I was also dealing with cash shortages and poisonous darts from the smaller opposition units meant a lengthy feeling game like a tug of war. You'd push, but be pushed back, only to push out once more. Eventually, you'd make it to the opposition base, but did you have enough strength there and then to get the job done, or would you need to call on reinforcements that would spawn all the way at the other edge of the stage and slowly walk towards where they're needed?
9 minutes might not feel like too long a time to spend on a level, and for a downloadable title, it probably feels like a meaty bit of gameplay. To me, it felt like a bit of a slog. Swords & Soldiers was easy to get into, but its repetitive nature wasn't winning me over.
Final Word
I don't know how far through the Viking campaign I was at this point, but after only 40 minutes or so, I had seen enough of Swords of Soldiers. It was nice to look at, especially in this HD version, and it runs well, but it wasn't quite doing it for me.
However, as a new take on RTS games, and if we try to imagine it on the Nintendo Wii, Swords & Soldiers is perhaps a kind of forgotten gem. A genre that arguably shouldn't exist on the Wii is turned into something that makes the most of the Wii's hardware and input methods, and the result is something that works.
It may not be terribly enjoyable to you, but the gameplay on display does its job well. My dislike towards Swords & Soldiers - if dislike is even the right word - isn't aimed at its gameplay.
You should definitely give it a look to see how it does things first hand, but as delightful as the look may be, as silly as the story is, Swords & Soldiers probably isn't going to find itself getting played a whole lot after this outing.
Fun Facts
With a low budget, the developers offered an external audio company some of the royalties from the game's sales instead, an offer that Sonic Picnic accepted based on how impressed they were upon seeing the prototype.
Swords & Soldiers, developed by Ronimo Games, first released in 2009.
Version played: Swords & Soldiers HD, PC, 2009.