As a single-player experience, this thing has absolutely no value. The AI certainly is, and that's one of the few major complaints that I have against Nidhogg. It's actually possible to win a round by slaying a character once and then just jumping over the person repeatedly until you reach the end, if the player is incompetent enough to let you do that. If you die, you'll respawn a couple dozen meters back, defend and look for an opportunity to go on the offensive. Nidhogg actually unfolds quite a bit like a sport there's even a figurative "ball" in the sense that only the player who delivered the last killing strike can advance forward. The objective of a match is not necessarily to slay the other player, but to reach the goal line at the end of a perfectly symmetrical side-scrolling level. The one other thing that makes Nidhogg's flow unusual is that while it's easy to be killed, dying is only a mild setback. Even the very act of attacking often feels like a gamble since it's so easy to die, much of your time in Nidhogg will be spent trying to psych other players out, tricking them into launching foolish assaults or letting their guards down. Throwing your sword can take the enemies surprise – from a distance, no less – but if they deflect it, you'll be left without a weapon until you pick up a new one. A successful dive kick will disarm your enemy, but if the other player has his or her sword positioned high, you'll just wind up with an impaled gut. More often, though, Nidhogg rewards patience and versatile use of the game's additional abilities, as well as a thorough knowledge of when to use them it's a perfectly balanced fighting system in that everything can be countered by something else, and everything is a risk. Killing your opponent is a matter of getting the first strike past a parry, and sometimes it's as simple as being quick on the button – you'll run headfirst toward the other player, swing your sword, and bring him or her down without so much as losing a step. You'll automatically block any blows delivered from the same height, but it takes a moment to switch stances. For one, you can hold your sword at three different heights. Developer Messhof's wager is that watching two skilled swordsmen trade blows and play mind games can be just as nerve-wracking as seeing them shed blood, and it pays off.įor as simple as the controls are, there's a surprisingly extensive moveset to familiarize yourself with. What makes this particular game unique is everything that leads up to each kill: the footwork, the parrying, the acrobatics, the defensive back-and-forth. When there's violence in Nidhogg, it happens swiftly and with little complication – one player stabs the other, and the latter player dies. If this is a fighting game, then it's a fighting game with only one attack button, and in which it takes merely a single strike to bring an opponent down. It's a one-on-one dueler presented in the most bare-bones of packages, and between its two-button control scheme and 8-bit visual style, it's nothing, neither technologically nor logistically, that couldn't have been done on the NES.īut, as with any game that's simple in nature yet satisfying in practice, Nidhogg's worth is in its ideas. What I can tell you is that most fighting games absolutely baffle me, whereas I understand Nidhogg perfectly well. "Even the very act of attacking often feels like a gamble."įighting games are one of the very few genres that I tend to actively avoid, so I'm unsure as to whether or not Nidhogg even qualifies as one.
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