SWORN Review

A Co-op Sword in a Roguelike Stone 

SWORN is a 1-4 player, action roguelike developed by Windwalk Games, where you fight to reclaim the mythical land of Camelot from the reign of a corrupted King Arthur. 

Take up your sword as a Soulforged knight and, through swearing fealty to the Lords, wield the power of the Fae. These powers include over 200 unique blessings alongside many, many other creative avenues to gameplay like multiple player characters, new weapons, and five skill trees. 

Some of this may already be sounding a bit familiar?

SWORN tries to fill a gap in the roguelike market, however, it’s trying to fit into one that’s already filled. ‘Hades-clone’ is a term you will hear a lot around the discussion of SWORN, as that is almost exactly what SWORN is… almost. 

When it comes to media that is very obviously influenced by other titles, there are a lot of expectations based on how much the new can transform and build upon the old. It’s been five years since the release of Hades, so let’s see how/if SWORN manages to live up to expectations.

A Comic Camelot 

There is no discussion about SWORN that doesn’t mention Hades, and rightly so. However, I want to start by discussing one of the aspects that SWORN does approach differently – the visuals. 

There are two qualities of Hades highlighted as ‘standouts’ by the community: the narrative-based systems, and the visuals. Seeing as SWORN very blatantly adapts the former, I was glad to find that it does its own thing with the latter. I believe that was a necessary decision for the game to be taken seriously, so it’s not just co-op Hades. 

As a fan of high contrast, high sharpness visuals, the cell-shaded art style is a favourite of mine and many others (just look at Borderlands’ success). SWORN pulls this style off beautifully, with striking backgrounds, set pieces, characters, and enemies. The comic world was inspired by the work of American artist Mike Mignola, a decision that leads to visuals that ooze confidence, sticking to a strong creative vision that’s present in every aspect of the world. 

The atmosphere these visuals create is also outstanding and varies wildly from area to area. An example of the excellent atmosphere is in the second area called ‘The Cornwall Township:’ green gas seeps from ooze left by the swamps that surround an abandoned town. Destroyed pumpkin stalls and hay stacked high are left in the rotting fields, hinting at a forgotten community. Everything from the interactable poison mushrooms to the wooden fencing trapping you here is grimy and green with rot. 

Areas like these really sell the narrative corruption of the land, creating a great atmosphere for you to smash and dash your way through. The untraversable backgrounds were a personal favourite of mine: look over gaps in ruined castle walls to see that the monolith extends far beneath you, down a mountain and on to a green valley of flowing waterfalls that lead back up to the castle’s man-made streams and wells – lovely attention to detail. 

With each area being visually distinct, they house appropriate, narratively-fitting enemies. Warriors and beasts from the King Arthur Legend reside in castles, and arenas, whilst plague rat-assassins hide in the swamps. These enemies also have great animations that are way above expectations for an indie game. Animations as a whole are a standout, especially on ultimate abilities and boss move sets (which I’ll touch on more later). 

My favourite ultimate was granted to my friend (who I played the entire game with) by the Lord, Gogmagog, The Last Giant: the ability features the Lord’s giant, orange-chained fist falling from the sky again and again, repeatedly pummelling and stunning enemies into a pulp – extremely satisfying and pretty funny.

One small issue with the visuals relates to how the 3D models of the Fae Lords feel inconsistent compared to the rest of the game. Due to these models being tied to a core mechanic in SWORN it became very noticeable. We found these Tell-Tale depictions noticeably weaker than the rest of the visuals, which left them feeling out of place. With character icons being 2D and the game using an isometric camera angle, you don’t often see the 3D character models face on. So when 2D renditions and top-down models are what you see for the majority of the runtime, it always came as a bit of a shock when we’d pick up a boon and are shown two massive 3D models of the Fae Lords that looked, to us, to be unfinished. I found my friend’s description of this dissonance to be both accurate and funny: they said, “it’s like looking at Phineas from Phineas and Ferb from the front, rather than side on.”

Hades features superb artwork of its Gods when picking up boons, so this feels like Windwalk Games’ attempt to feature a similar visual in SWORN, with the twist being the 3D models. The ironic thing is that there are lovely 2D previews of the Fae Lords that already exist in the game (in the boons option menu). I understand that they want to be distinct and throw their own spin on their Hades bones, but at this point I’d suggest using the 2D renders instead, the 3D models will not stop the comparisons. 

A Short Look at The Soundtrack

The soundtrack is deep with around 41 full-length tracks that play throughout. The majority of these songs will see players bobbing their head in the heat of battle, but then quickly be forgotten afterwards; serving as nice, acceptable video game backing tracks. 

However, some of the boss themes truly slap, and had me doing the classic: “hang on, stop attacking me bloodthirsty boss, what’s the name of this song?” The first final boss (wink wink) has a particularly amazing electric-theme that progressively gets more metal as the fight goes on. 

Combat 

First impressions were that combat felt weighted, with nicely telegraphed attacks leading to satisfying dodge timings. I was glad to see that this stayed consistent from start to finish; combat was always outstanding. You feel grounded and are punished for being greedy or getting comfortable – a feeling that can feel missing in Hades where movement and dodging is floaty and forgiving. 

The different weapons encouraged different playstyles both intentionally and more creatively. Obviously being able to fire multiple daggers quickly works well for stacking Mab (the Queen of Spider’s) poison boons, but also the subtle knockback from the sword’s heavy attack allowed me to push enemies into the frost nova I got from Beira, The Frozen Witch. 

Interactable environments are always a nice touch and work great here with an interesting variety. From pressure plates that send spikes into your legs or fire arrows, to mushrooms that explode into poison clouds, there is always another way to take out enemies that doesn’t involve simply smacking them. These environmental additions were also designed to fit their environments, like a prickly urchin platform in the dock level, and fire-spewing statues in the lava castle. 

Controller aim assist is noticeably well programmed and very, very snappy, but can clash with the environmental traps a lot. For example, when using a ranged weapon you will almost always accidently snap onto a nearby enemy over the interactable you were aiming for. You can turn aim assist off in the settings but not down, leaving you with either a flat disadvantage in combat or a hard time hitting interactables at range – a middle ground option would be nice. 

Boss Fight Knights 

Each area has the chance to house a mini-boss and always ends with a big boss fight. Bosses feel incredibly satisfying. They feature environmental effects, incredibly well-telegraphed attacks, cool narrative-based designs, and some really original arena-work. 

These can feel a little overwhelming at first, but are easily learnt. Similarly to both Hades and Dark Souls, bosses attack in patterns, which means you learn as you fight. You can’t just mindlessly mash your way through; they take learning, skill, and timing, feeling wondrously satisfying when you manage to pull it off. 

I cannot emphasise enough how much I enjoyed the mechanics of one boss in particular – The final boss of Deep Harbour (the third area). 

Minor spoiler alert. The focus here is on arena hazards but the brilliance is in how they are implemented around the stage. Lady Bedivere (the boss) has two raft-platforms: an outer one and an inner one. The outer one is controlled by her, sending out looping water-sharks and appearing herself to attack with her staff or chuck orbs of water. The inner raft is controlled by two of her mer-minions who dance around it with damaging screams or join their staffs together with water lasers. This arena leaves you with two choices: you focus Lady Bedivere and have to deal with the inner platform being a no-go zone, or you focus the mer-minions and gain the inner platform as a safe zone with the downside of foregoing DPS on the boss. 

This fight never got old in repeat runs and always had me hyped whenever I came across it – absolutely loved it. 

Features… From Hades

So the Fae Lords work identically to Hades. If you’ve played Hades, you’ve played the main gameplay loop of SWORN before, (without co-op). Every few rooms you will pick between two Fae Lords and a selection of  boons which are mostly your classic roguelike, ‘add a stack of chill every light attack,’ or, ‘create poison spiders on kill.’ 

Some of these boons do actually manage to surpass Hades when it comes to variety. Examples include: more boons with pros and cons, companion boons, and mechanical boons like hitting foes with the tip of your weapon does increased damage. Overall the boons, like in Hades, are great for variety and mesh super well with the varied weapons and characters.

Thankfully SWORN does manage to build upon some of Hades’ systems, like the weapon system. Firstly, there are a lot more weapons and spells here, with each of the four unique characters having four unique weapons – a very welcome change to Hades which only had one playable character with five weapons. The system goes even deeper through the character Nimue who can upgrade your weapons further with special currency and a really nice UI where you get to physically see where you are upgrading the weapon on the model. 

Spells are tied to each character, four for each, and are simply fun. The starting ‘knife throw’ doesn’t do the system justice as it expands into far more interesting spells including invincible shoulder-charges and placeable crystal-turrets.  

Enhancements from the NPC Guinevere are made to be somewhat unique to SWORN. They are extremely multifaceted when affecting what spawns in runs, similar to a system Hades, but to a much greater extent – adding the ultimate abilities, companion boons, quest boards, currency exchanges, and much more. 

A less built upon system from Hades is the actual in-game pickups that are rewarded for completing rooms. These include horns, anvils, swords in stones, and more. All disappointingly just retextured features from Hades. Horns increase the effectiveness of an existing boon, (like the poms of power, from Hades), anvils make modifications to your weapons (like the Daedalus Hammer, from Hades), and so on… 

Level Design

The amount of room variety is super well handled, with a surprising amount. There are wave-killing mini games, survival rooms, and even dedicated parkour/trap levels which were completely unexpected and a nice change of pace. The Final area switches up the style entirely, no longer including rooms at all, but I won’t spoil that for you.  

An Incredibly well-designed Hades-Clone

So yes, at its roots, SWORN is just co-op Hades, but who doesn’t want co-op Hades? It does an okay job distancing itself through the visuals, setting, and sheer amount of content – but the bones are still very obvious. Variety is the lifeforce of roguelikes and there is a lot here, surpassing even that of Hades (which is a great sell). 

However the obvious question remains, can I give a perfect score to a game whose ideas are almost all taken 1:1 from another title. I think the answer is no. If SWORN was more original, and did more to carve out its own niche in the genre, it would get a perfect score. But as it stands, it falls short. 

Important Links

Camelot has Fallen – SWORN is a New Co-op Action Roguelike on Xbox Game Pass and Play Anywhere – https://www.thexboxhub.com/camelot-has-fallen-sworn-is-a-new-co-op-action-roguelike-on-xbox-game-pass-and-play-anywhere/

Grab SWORN from the Xbox Store (on Game Pass if you like) – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sworn/9MWDJRQ1BXTC/0010

There’s a Deluxe Edition if you like – http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sworn-digital-deluxe-edition/9N2Q1NCX7HVC/0010