As I’ve mentioned previously, I really like Swords & Sorcery games, particularly RPGs. I also like fantasy and semi-fantasy platformers like Castlevania. So, when Sword Master came up on this week’s issue of Nintendo Power, I was looking forward to it. All things considered, I probably shouldn’t have looked forward to it…

The Premise: As a lone knight, you must go forward and defeat an evil sorcerer who is enslaving the land with his evil minions.

The Good: The combat has a bit of depth to it, in terms you, and your enemies, have high, medium, and low attacks they can use, and you have ways of defending against them, sort of.

The Bad: The levels are very generic. Aside from some basic jumping, you walk forward, and kill everything in your way. Think of the gameplay as Altered Beast, only without the transformations, or the fireballs, and generally more bland and generic.

The Ugly: As I mentioned, supposedly, you can high-block the high attacks, middle block the middle attacks, and low block the low attacks. I can pull off the low block, but I couldn’t pull off any other other blocks. I could pull off all 3 levels of attacks, but the AI reactions were cheap enough that for the mid-bosses, I just couldn’t hit them, no matter how much I tried.  The game is just cheap in all the bad ways.

The Verdict: Avoid this game. There had to have been a better game that could have taken this game’s slot in Nintendo Power. I’m not even going to put referral links for this game in this review. That’s how unimpressed I am.