Successfully beating the odds and fighting off a whole group of enemies is one of the most satisfying action game scenarios, and En Garde! aims to take advantage of this. The Batman: Arkham games and the titles it has inspired, such as Marvel’s Spider-Man and Sifu offer excellent examples of this done right. En Garde! attempts to join the fray, taking a noticeable amount of influences from the above games and was implemented with tight controls alongside an attractive, colourful presentation. But between an extremely short runtime, a frustratingly weak protagonist, and tedious gameplay, En Garde! doesn’t match up to its inspirations.
En Garde! is broken into four chapters across its three-hour story campaign. It sees the swordfighter Adalia de Volador going up against her nemesis, the Count-Duke: a greedy noble oppressing the citizenry via shows of force and overzealous taxation. Each chapter sees Adalia bring the fight to him while battling scores of his guards. In addition to combat, Adalia can run, jump, climb ledges, and swing off of various pieces of geometry. The game does a decent job of making the player feel like an era-appropriate hero much of the time.
“Between an extremely short runtime, a frustratingly weak protagonist, and tedious gameplay, En Garde! doesn’t match up to its inspirations.”
The fighting itself is where En Garde! can’t quite pick up the slack. Enemies come in about half a dozen varieties, ranging from easily dispatched peons to foes with nigh-impregnable defences. Adalia can strike with her sword, parry, dodge, kick, and throw objects she’s picked up. Her default attack doesn’t carry much weight or oomph, which makes the combat feel less impactful than it should. I never felt like I was stabbing enemies as much as I was hitting them with a NERF sword.
Enemy attacks can either be parried or dodged, and the window on the parries is highly lenient. But enemy defences are so resilient that Adalia ends up feeling terribly hapless much of the time. While she can freely dispatch peons with her attacks, all of the other enemies are a different matter. Some require you to parry or dodge their strikes before they leave an opening. Others require you to fill up a fatigue bar to put them in a weakened state before they can be hit. For instance, one enemy can only be damaged in this weakened state, so you’ll need to kick them downstairs after throwing an object at them. It gets old quickly.
One-on-one, it’s not much of a problem. But En Garde’s challenge, when it arises, is primarily built around throwing groups of enemies at you while you have to weaken them or kick them into traps instead of swashbuckling. I often felt like it was less a sword-fighting game and more a game of baiting enemies into traps.
The game can be fairly challenging, but the difficulty feels artificial since Adalia simply isn’t built to actually duel the enemies this way. You often have to kick a box at an enemy or throw a jug on their head to keep them busy while you fight their comrades. Adalia is supposed to be a master swordswoman, but she simply isn’t capable of fighting toe-to-toe with most foes.
This comes to a head in the game’s final encounter, which represents a massive difficulty spike where you’re simultaneously fighting several enemies that are mostly impervious to damage while other enemies throw bombs at you. It’s a truly awful section. Once you beat the three-hour story, there’s an arena with rogue-lite elements with multiple difficulties and randomized bonuses that you’ll get to apply to Adalia between levels. But it isn’t enough to save the game.
En Garde! is short and disappointing, and even with its brief runtime in mind, I was sick of it by the end. If you’re looking for an exciting crowd-fighting game with plenty of combat options, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
