“En Garde!” is an okay experience, it starts off really well and then slowly starts showing its cracks, with repetitive enemy encounters, samey levels and design, plus even repeated boss battles; but, on the other hand, it has a good cast of characters, colourful graphics and aesthetic, some innocent but charming humour, and a fairly good combat system that holds up for most of the game.“En Garde!” is an okay experience, it starts off really well and then slowly starts showing its cracks, with repetitive enemy encounters, samey levels and design, plus even repeated boss battles; but, on the other hand, it has a good cast of characters, colourful graphics and aesthetic, some innocent but charming humour, and a fairly good combat system that holds up for most of the game.
The biggest virtue of the game is its combat system, it follows the same concept as the Arkham games with a button to parry and an attack, with some abilities to the side that you obtain as you progress through the game. However, the big problem with the combat system starts appearing the minute you face multiple and tougher enemies; the entirety of the combat is similar to Sekiro, where you have to break the posture of the enemies before you can actually finish them, the problem is that a lot of the times you won’t be able to counter, nor dodge, much of the attacks for the simple fact that the game doesn’t have an order in its fights.
What I mean by that is that in the Arkham games you usually get hit by an enemy or by multiple ones, but there’s always something that you can do that doesn’t break the flow of the game: use gadgets, counter both enemies, Heck! Counter three of them, there’s always an out in the Arkham series. In this game however, there isn’t such a thing, a lot of times you’ll get an enemy that’s attacking you with an attack that you can counter, whilst simultaneously other is attacking you with attack you’re supposed to dodge, so you’re left to rely on chip damage to take down most of the enemies in the game; is either that, or run away and interact with objects around the level to take down the enemies posture, you can kick barrels, some of which explode on impact, other times you can use lanterns to set of cannons; when this interactions work is fun, when they don’t, it can get really tedious at times.
The most egregious part was the end of the game, the encounters you face and the repetition of multiple boss encounters just left me with a sour taste in my mouth and even while the game felt quite short, it felt in that last level like it was dragging itself… because it was, what more prove do you need but the repetition of content you’ve already beaten.
Having said that, the game can be fun at times, I liked the characters, I like the interactive objects and I like most of the encounters that led to the last couple of levels, is just those two last acts what really felt -to me-, like padding and artificially prolonging an experience with a multitude of encounters that swarm you with enemies and in turn, strain and expose the worst aspects of the combat’s system design; considering the game relies so heavily in its combat to carry the experience, this really isn’t something that should have happened.… Expand
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