Have at thee!
What is swashbuckling? I get that it’s that thing where you have a sword and you slash with it and do daring deeds and flip around, but I don’t get the word. Swashbuckle. Swash with the sword, yeah, but buckle? Do you swash with a buckle or at one? Don’t know. What I do know is that En Garde is all about swashbuclkling, and En Garde is a pretty dang good game, so whatever that is, by the distributive property, it must be good, too. I think that’s how that works.
Gameplay
En Garde! Is a 3rd person brawler with an emphasis on environmental interactions. You have one attack button, which does a quick three-hit combo, a jump, a parry and a kick button. There are no fancy combos or juggles; it plays more like a beat-em-up. You focus on defeating enemies and controlling the crowd, keeping the tougher, more problematic enemies at bay while focusing on the weaker ones, by kicking them off ledges, kicking things into them or just throwing a bucket on their head to distract them.
When you’re not fighting, you get to do some basic but functional platforming through nice looking levels, along with some light exploration to find easter eggs and secrets. Along the way you’ll meet up with a small cast of fun characters that make the game feel like you’re playing a Saturday morning cartoon, if you can excuse the cliché.
Combat
En Garde’s combat does a great job of translating swashbuckling into videogame form. I don’t know what that word means, but when you hear it, you know what it’s referring to. Some guy with a rapier who jumps around, besting his opponents and outwitting them with acrobatics and fancy sword-play. You picture someone who doesn’t beat their enemies, he “thwarts” them. Someone who might be described as a rapscallion or a dashing rogue. Adalia, the game’s main character, is just that type of girl. She flips around, swings on ropes and fights her enemies more like Bugs Bunny and less like a duelist.
You have one weapon throughout the entire game: a rapier, the preferred tool of someone who swashes buckles. You attack with it and do a basic little three hit combo. It can’t be canceled into anything fancy, nor do you have any advanced tech or quirks to mess around with. It’s a very straightforward attack style that just sort of hits enemies.
There’s also a parry, because every melee-focused game has to have a parry, it’s a law written on a stone tablet somewhere. I’m not the biggest fan of parries. Game developers usually throw them into the game because it’s the cool new thing to do, because Sekiro did it, so did the Souls series, and those sold well and were well-regarded, so now everyone parries. The thing is, the parries in the Fromsoft games served very specific purposes. Instead of being a cool skill-based defensive option that keeps you active even when you’re not attacking, developers see it as a way to make you feel cool for pressing a button at a correct time. It usually slows the combat down and makes you sit there and wait for an enemy to attack so you can parry and counter. It slows the pace of everything down to a crawl.
I mention this because the parry in En Garde is closer to the parry in Sekiro, where it’s an active thing you do to stay engaged in combat, and not something you have to wait and fish for. You can go on the offensive and attack enemies at your own pace. If you want to bait parries, you can. There’s also a kind of stagger bar/poise meter, because again Sekiro did it, but it’s well-implemented.
The stagger system, called the “armor” in this game, isn’t a super-armor system where you can’t hurt enemies. It makes them tougher and, while armored, they can’t be kicked. To get them to open up you can parry an attack, dodge, or throw something at them. When you do this, they become surprised and an exclamation mark appears above them, meaning you can kick them around.
You can attack enemies and they will react by getting hit and put into hit stun, as they should. Tougher enemies will riposte your attacks, but not in a punishing way. They don’t counter-attack and damage you for trying to hit them. When you attack a tougher enemy, it gets them to act so you can then react. You don’t have to sit around waiting for them to strike so you can start your offense. You can gently tap then on the shoulder with your sword and ask them to open up for you so you can kick them into a wall.
You’ll be kicking guys so much you’d think Adalia was a mule in her previous life. Kicking is how you control your enemies and interact with the environment. Kick a guy into a wall to stun him, then fight his other buddies while he’s down. Kick a tough enemy away to deal with a weaker enemy that’s in front of you, so you can duel the tougher guy after thinning their numbers. You can also kick enemies down stairs or off ledges, which breaks their stance (and several other things) and lets you deal a lot more damage to them.
When you’re not kicking dudes, you’re throwing things at them. Everything from bombs, to lanterns to guitars or even an entire roast chicken. Every arena is cluttered with a ton of little interactables, each with their own properties and uses. They can be something simple like the water jugs, that you can throw at an enemy to surprise them and open them up for attack. There are oil lanterns that can burn enemies and stun them, or you can use them to activate explosives. If it’s on a table, there’s a chance you can chuck it at someone for your benefit.
Along with throwables there are other ways to injure your opponents. Things like cannons, tables and the classic chandelier. Some can be activated by kicking an enemy into them. You kick an enemy into a weapon rack, it falls on them and it deals tons of damage. You see a canon just sitting there? Go light its fuse with an explosive or a lamp and have it fire on your enemies for you. Each arena is set up in a way that there’s something useful wherever you look.
You’ll need to use every trick up your sleeve to defeat the Count-Duke’s guards. They will come at you in groups and they like to attack at the same time. They don’t sit around and wait for their turn, they just go for it. In fact, this behavior is explicitly told to the player in-game. Whenever you fight someone, every other enemy in the area will do their best to interrupt your duel.
Enemies use two types of attacks: Regular strikes, which can be parried, and red strikes that have to be dodge. This sounds like the kind of color-coded Simon Says nonsense I usually scoff at in games, but here it’s done with a purpose. Whenever enemies go to attack you to interrupt your fights, they will use the red attack, meaning you can’t stand in one spot and parry infinitely. You have to dodge out of the way, which means repositioning, which means probably switching target from the one you were originally fighting. This behavior keeps you moving and encourages an active, hit-and-run play style where you have to move around and be pro-active. While you’re moving around, you can explore the arena and find interactables or better positions to fight from.
Moving around gives you access to a lot of fun stuff, like the interactions, but it also gives you opportunities to open your opponents up with other stunts. You can get to higher ground and push enemies off ledges, which drains their armor or can even knock them out in one hit if they fall into water or from too high up. You can also use the high ground to leap over your enemies, doing a cool somersault which surprises enemies. You can also swing on poles or off ropes to surprise enemies in an area, or slide across a table for a similar effect. There’s always something acrobatic you can do to make your opponents vulnerable to kicks.
This is why I don’t mind the parries and the stagger bar in this game, because there are a ton of alternate ways to get your opponents into the surprised state and interact with them. You don’t have to wait for them to attack so you can parry and then do something. You can attack them and initiate aggression actively. If you want a more specific form of crowd control, like if you want to isolate a specific enemy, you can throw something at them and stun them. Even when you’re in an area with no interactables, you can always climb on something and hop over your foes, or slide into them from across a table, and you can stagger them. If you could only deal with the armor with parries, It’d be a pain in the neck.
These separate elements come together to form a fun, engaging combat system that encourages active play and constant movement. You’ll be switching from melee combat, suddenly break out into a run to get to a better position, kick a guy into a vase which spills wine on the floor, causing the rest to trip, then you jump over them from a ledge and get the drop on the duelist at the back. You’re constantly improvising and looking for the best angles to deal with your enemies. It really makes you feel like you’re buckling swashes.
Presentation
En Garde goes for a brightly colored illustrated style, with a lot of warm colors and cool blues for the shadows. The environments are packed with little details and props, making each area look nice and populated. Most aspects of the arenas are shown clearly and you can quickly distinguish what’s interactable and what isn’t.
The characters all animate well in combat, with quick movements that make the controls feel snappy and responsive. Enemies show their personality well in their stances and movements. The basic, weak enemies have very scared, cowardly stances and unsure swings. Contrast this to the duelists who stand with their chests out, backs straight and attack with quick, precise motions. The Captains look the part of a tank, with their rotund bodies, heavy armor and wide stance. It’s easy to tell what an enemy is about at a quick glance, and you can keep track of them visually even during a busy fight.
The game’s audio design is a highlight. The voice acting is great, with each character giving a big, hammy performance full of personality, with excellent performances all around. It’s all high-quality stuff.
The only point against the voice acting is the lack of a full Spanish dub. I think it’s strange to have a game set in Spain, with actors who clearly speak Spanish, but no voice option for it. The only voice over is English with random Spanish thrown in. This is a very minor nitpick, but I’m a little miffed that we missed out on a full game that sounds like Dontè el Exterminador de Demonios.
Each hit in combat feels weighty and nice thanks to the sound design. Each slash of the sword cuts through the air with a sharp swoosh and hits with a nice metallic impact. Enemy slashes are pitched so that each stage of their attack has a different audio cue. Every dodge and action is accompanied by a satisfying swoosh, making the simple act of moving around seem like you’re doing something cool and stylish. It makes fights feel alive.
The soundtrack, like the other audio aspects of this game, is fantastic. A Spanish soundtrack with a lot of fast acoustic guitars, triumphant trumpets, all hurried along with the snaps of castanets. Each track sounds similar, but their subtle changes in tempo and introduction of different instruments, like accordions for more lively tracks or tubas for dungeon ambient. It’s adventurous and adds to the high-flying feel of the game’s combat.
It’s a bit short
I prefer shorter games, but En Garde is a little on the short side, even for me. The full campaign can be completed in around 3 hours, with only 4 episodes. Arcade games are very short, too, but they have more gameplay per minute. A 40 minute game like Final Fight or Dodonpachi has a lot more going on in its short run time. From the moment you start, the game is firing on all cylinders and making you work for every victory. In En Garde, the first of these four episodes is a prolonged tutorial and the rest are interspersed with with platforming sections. These are supposed to break up the combat, to keep it from becoming monotonous, but my philosophy is that you should pace the combat by having the player take breaks facing easier opponents every now and then, so they don’t get too tired constantly fighting the hard ones. Here, the action pauses a bit too often for my liking, making the short runtime feel even shorter.
Another aspect that makes the game feel short is the difficulty. Short arcade games, and older games, could get more playtime by giving the player a tougher challenge. Sure, some might say this is artificially extending the game, but making the game more difficult no only extends the play time, but it engages the player more and makes them want to get better and try again. En Garde, even though it’s a lot of fun and it has some very solid mechanics, is a bit too easy, and I never felt the game got to its top speed.
The enemy variety makes the game look a bit more anemic than it should. The ones that are in the game are solid; they are different from one another, they serve distinct roles in combat and they offer good variety in fighting styles and approaches, but there are only five different types throughout the entire game (not counting the three bosses who are very similar). A few more enemy types would make the game feel more fleshed out.
The thing with the length, combined with the difficulty and the somewhat low combat density, is that it makes it feel like it could have done a bit more with what it has. It needed two or three more combat arenas, a few more enemy types to make you use more creative methods and more difficulty to get you to really engage with the game and push its systems to the limit.
I think of it as a bit of a half and half complaint and praise. I complain that the game is too short, but it’s praise because I wanted more of it. I want to play more En Garde. What the game offers is a lot of fun, but it left me wanting more, and I think that with an extra level or more combat encounters in each level, this could have been remedied.
At least the game has an extra Arena mode, where you go through multiple randomly generated combat encounters in a row. It’s a great addition, and it lets you enjoy the combat in a more direct way.
Conclusion
En Garde is a great game that provides a fun, unique experience but exits the stage a bit too quickly. Its fundamental systems are excellent, with a lot of different interactions that all feel well thought out and useful. Its melee combat is simple, but fun, supported by a surprisingly robust interaction system that encourages active play and improvisation. It’s great, but there should have been more, like a slice of cake a nutritionist would approve of.
I keep harping on about how difficult games are better, and have looked down on casual games, but En Garde helped me remember that I don’t necessarily dislike easy or casual games. I dislike them when they’re boring. En Garde might not be the most complex, deep or difficult brawler. It’s not Devil May Cry 3 or God Hand, but it’s a ton of fun.
I wholeheartedly recommend En Garde. It perfectly captures the swashbuckling spirit with an endearing cast, excellent music, great visuals and a whole lot of soul.
I’m still not sure what swashbuckling is. Maybe it’s a vibes thing you understand if you somersault over a bumbling adversary.
