Auto Sword is ok. While it does have a few more obvious flaws (mostly taking the form of bugs), the main problem with it is simply that there isn't enough to this game to make it interesting to play or think about. It's a good timewaster (at least, it was good at wasting my time) and not much else.
In terms of presentation, there's very little to complain about. The visuals are cohesive, and clean. The sprites especially are really detailed, I really like them. Important information is easily readable (except for in the case of a few similar unit silhouettes) without looking ugly. The music isn’t very good at immersing you in the game’s world, but it matches the laid back pace of gameplay, which I find more important in a game like this. Sound effects are pretty weak, but in a game like this that doesn’t matter very much. Overall, it’s all solid.
There are 2 gameplay loops here, one within the other. The larger one is entering tournaments and using the rewards from each tournament to gain permanent buffs. The smaller one is battling in a round, and using the rewarded money to purchase units and shop upgrades between rounds. The pacing of these loops is probably the best thing about the gameplay. Every round is preceded by the preparation beforehand, and capped off by a final moment of judgment to decide potential rewards. A moment which promises both the potential high of success and the possible setback of failure. Though failures still mean enough to make this judgment exciting, they offer some reward, so as to smooth out player frustration and keep them invested (even if these rewards aren’t enough, the permanent rewards at the end of the tournament act to further soften the blow). The fights themselves, while not very interesting in their mechanics, act as further anticipation for the moment of judgment to make it all the more exhilarating when it finally comes. The player is put through this cycle of anticipation and reward again and again and again as they play, and it’s absolutely engrossing.
This pacing works to cover up some of the insufficiencies of the gameplay, at least for a time. These insufficiencies are mostly due to the way win conditions in this game work. To survive a tournament, the player needs a winning build, usually consisting of 1-2 powerful keywords. Brute forcing the situation with high level high stat units is possible in the beginning but the endgame all but requires both high level units and at least 1 active keyword. Both of these require multiple units. Keywords can only be activated when a certain amount of units (always more than 1) with said keyword is on the battlefield. Leveling up units requires 3 of the same troop of the same level.
On the one hand, this is a solid framework in many ways. There’s a clear progression that the player can understand and follow. The player must plan their builds around finding different units with the same keyword. They have to consider both winning the next battle and contributing to a more powerful long term build. All this is good stuff, but there are a few problems here:
Firstly, this system is very hostile to player adaptation and expression. Every build requires many units to function, all of which need to be found in the shop and upgraded (and room needs to be made for them in some cases by upgrading the shop) and these builds need to be constantly improved as the game goes on. Because of the high cost of any given build, and the necessity of keeping your current build strong enough to survive the next battle, altering your build after you’ve made one is never practical. You’re almost always stuck with the build you started with, which is mostly determined by the units the shop gives you in the early game. Randomness has a very high impact on the direction of the game. This also kills builds based around late-game or rare keywords, such as dragon. Comparing this to something like Slay the Spire (which is similar in that it’s also based around combining individual functions to create more powerful synergies) every card has an individual effect that could theoretically be used on its own, and synergies are more variable in cost, allowing ones that require much less setup. This allows the player to have more agency in what builds they use, and more flexibility in altering their build partway through. Auto sword is in want of all these things.
There’s also just the fact that synergies in this game feel really limp. There aren’t very many of them, and while their effects can be very impactful, they don’t feel very cool and don’t require any skill on the part of the player to figure out how to set up. They just aren’t very fun to play around with, and seeing as these are kind of the selling point of this game (at least to me) that’s pretty lame. There are special cases where combining 2 keywords can make for a more organic synergy (for example, combining the undead and occult keywords) but these are hard to set up and often not worth the effort. A shame, since using these were my favorite moments in the game.
Finally, the progression in this game makes it very hard to achieve anything during the midgame. Once you have 1-2 keywords active and mostly level 2 units on the board, all your options become restrictively expensive. Upgrading a troop to level 3 requires 3 times as many units as upgrading to level 2. These units must be found, and then bought, and upgrading gives middling rewards. Upgrading a keyword to the next level is usually more rewarding but most level 2 keyword effects require the player to have 4 different units with the same keyword on the board. These units must again be found, and bought, and at least a few of them must be upgraded at least once in order to stand a chance, and sometimes the player must upgrade the shop to make room for them (shop upgrades become very expensive past level 4). The player could try to activate a new keyword, but this requires its own ordeal of finding, upgrading, and making space for units. This means that for a few rounds, I found myself simply waiting for the money to afford these expenditures. It’s a slow spot in a game that is usually well paced.
Oh, and this game is unusually buggy. The bugs I encountered are:
- The “wild attack” text appearing whenever a unit with an active Wild keyword attacked
- The meter for the final sword overflowing instead ending and refusing to give me the final permanent powerup on the skill tree
- The music sometimes not playing during battle when I had the music on
- Pausing mid-battle freezes the action even after unpausing and causes a softlock that can only be escaped by forfeiting
Also, some nitpicks, just because I can’t help myself:
- The “not enough gold!” warning appears when buying a unit from the shop if you have enough gold but don’t have any unit capacity
- The contender health system isn’t made very clear to the player
- I wish you could see the enemies you’re fighting next battle, so as to plan around them. There’s enough randomness in this game already
All in all, Auto Sword is a very good timewaster, but I’m unconvinced that it’s a very good game.
