#Nidhogg miniature series#

It makes for varied and interesting experience, especially when playing with other people. Other times you can spend a long time edging into position and waiting for the enemy to make a mistake. Sometimes you can win a game by simply surprise stabbing your opponent once, and then making a bee like for the end screen using well timed jumps and rolling leg swipes to get there. You can see a video of Game Grumps playing the game on local PvP below:Įach game is a wonderful mish-mash of madly exhilarating, button mashing action and slow, deliberate tactical fencing. The only way to win a game is to continue moving forward defeating, or avoiding the opponent until you reach the edge of the arena and jump in to the mouth of the titular Norse dragon thing. It simply gives you the right of way, and your enemy re-spawns immediately a little bit ahead of you.

In Nidhogg contact with the opponent’s blade is always lethal, but death does not end the round. In fact, it is probably even more brutal and unforgiving than the two other games which did have a number of non-lethal or partial damage scenarios. Most importantly however Nidhogg offers the exact type of intensely tactical, but at the same time fast paced, visceral and bloody combat experience as I described above. When combined with directional keys these controls combine into a limited, but incredibly expressive range of possible movements that include leg swipes, drop kicks, throwing the sword at the opponent and etc. It does however retain a stance system allowing you to move your sword up and down between three discrete positions. Instead of Bushido Blade’s dazzling array of moves and fighting styles you get two buttons: attack and jump. It is reductionist both in it’s graphical style (that is very reminiscent of the classic Prince of Persia style), as well as it’s mechanics. I consider Nidhogg to be a hybrid love child of the fighting systems from these two games. To this day I consider it one of the best sword fighting simulators I have ever played. All of these features combined together into an incredibly complex fighting system, which played a lot more like chess than Tekken. It was of course far more advanced technically: it employed different stances (typically with the weapon held low, middle and high), an array of different weapons ranging from rapiers and katanas to spears and halberds, three different attacks that had different range and timing depending on stance and weapon, large open arenas with destructible terrain and active blocking mechanic that took positioning, stance, weapon durability and terrain obstalces into account. It had no combos or health bars, but instead followed a principles very similar to the ancient fencing techniques employed in Prince of Persia: all hits were either lethal or incapacitating and the combat revolved around active blocking, positioning and exploiting enemy’s mistakes to deliver the deadly blow. The game was known as Bushido Blade and it was built like a classic, button mashing fighting game, despite not being one at all. It wasn’t until the PS1 era before I experienced this sort of simplistic, expressive but at the same time fast and deadly combat system. Skewering the opponent in a single blow after noticing and exploiting an opening was far more satisfying than slowly chipping away at their hit points until they finally fell over. It rewarded recognizing patterns and anticipating enemy movements. Not only that, but the combat felt visceral and brutal. That single button did a lot, creating a lot of possible plays and approaches to each fight. Despite the simplicity it did provide a surprisingly complex system in which you had to watch your position with regards to the enemy, parry his blows and exploit his openings. The mechanics involved were incredibly easy, as they involved a single button to lunge or parry, and side-to-side movement.

#Nidhogg miniature series#

In fact, I kinda wished that the game was just that: a series of combat challenges instead of the endless, annoying platforming. I didn’t much care for the super hard platforming and the only reason I ever put up with it, was that there was a chance I will be able to fence some dudes on every level. My favorite part of the original DOS version of Prince of Persia was the sword fighting.