Sadame

A fun action RPG with an infernal/feudal Japanese aesthetic and some great ideas, Sadame is a welcome eShop surprise. The core combat can get repetitive, and it lacks the fluid finesse of the best beat-'em-ups, but there's a lot here to love, including a particularly thoughtful implementation of its four-character hook. If you're in the mood for a hack-and-slash alt-history lesson, Sadame can definitely cut it.

Sadame is an interesting and well-built action game with RPG elements that offers a long and very replayable experience to those willing to dwell deep into it. It's not the most self-explanatory work in this regard, though, as many details will be lost on a Western audience and often the player is left with little explanation of the game's mechanics.

The real reason to play Sadame is for the combat. That juicy, explosive combat. Don’t bother picking up this game unless you just want to hit some folk for a few hours because long before the end of the game’s weak plot you will have grown bored of slogging through demons. And if you’re after other things, then there are certainly better games.

Sadame is a cute nostalgic trip on the memory lane that inadvertently reminded us how much better those 16-bit games were.

SADAME has some cool ideas, but it doesn't know how to execute them properly.

Sadame isn’t a terrible game by any stretch. Obvious attention was paid to get all the action/RPG trappings in place to create a deep experience. Everywhere, that is, except where it really counts.

Sadame will bring the best memories to the more nostalgic ones, and fighting against bosses is what shines the brightest in the game. Although some outdated mechanical contribution and the unattractiveness of its aesthetic are some weak points that may bother fans of the saga.

While Sadame isn't a bad game at all, it feels like a particularly hollow one. The game has promise, but it all gets squandered on combat that's too simple and dull for its own good. For $15, the quantity of content is impressive, but despite the good ideas present, Sadame doesn't have nearly enough variety or challenge to ultimately make it feel worthwhile.

If you get a big kick of out having pages of stats to micro-manage, or finding a lot of loot, then you may gleam some enjoyment out of of playing Sadame, but for me, I appreciate its art and its classes, and that’s unfortunately all I can commend.

As a budget release on the 3DS eShop, and if approached as something to play in short bursts, Sadame is worth a purchase after you’ve already exhausted the best this handheld has to offer. By no means a bad game, Sadame is a 2D hack-and-slash ultimately carried by its cross-character interaction, with the often dull combat holding it back from anything more than mediocrity.

Its SNES-like art style is greatly appealing, but the core gameplay loop is far too shallow to really recommend it as an alternative to other recent 3DS offerings.

Sadame is as repetitive as a song about thongs sung by man named Sisqo. The vast majority of encounters in the game follow the same pattern: enter an area, watch enemies appear, defeat enemies, watch more enemies appear, defeat more enemies, go to next area. That's it. That's the whole game.

I wanted a game that was like Muramasa: The Demon Blade; a game that would take the aesthetics of classical Japan and really do something with it. Instead, Sadame proves itself to be vapid and uninspired in the extreme, and so very disappointing as a result.