Die By The Sword + Limb From Limb

I already knew what I was getting into when I bought DBTS during the Interplay weekend sale. Having played the demo on and off over a span of 7 years, I made up my mind that yeah, I was finally going to get this! Firstly, this game is worth more than USD4.50. It is however, as fellow player xiani said, fundamentally flawed. The storyline is nearly non-existent - guy and girl are having a date at a campfire site, girl gets taken away by kobolds, guy has to smash through a whole army of weird monstrosities for her. But hey great games without good storylines do exist right? I guess this is the category where DBTS falls into. Where the game lacks in storytelling, it more than makes up for with the unique control scheme. The first of it's kind (but certainly not the last), DBTS features VSIM, a system that feels like a very early version of ragdoll physics. VSIM allows you to move the character's arms independently, with either the keyboard, mouse or joystick. The control scheme is far from perfect, and this is where it's flawed. It's hideously difficult to control, and it will make you scream in frustration when you miss that finishing blow to the orc's head, but it's possible to overcome. My choice of control is mouse VSIM, and while others complain about it being very clunky - which I cannot deny is true for new players - it offers versatility rarely seen in games. Dismemberment is also present in this game, thus giving players more gameplay choices. For example, if you're fighting an enemy that keeps blocking its head, you would probably aim for the lower part of its torso, or better still, take out one of its legs (note: if you want to buy the game but are hesitant to use mouse VSIM, I have started a thread in the forum that dissects this control scheme and shares tips) Like I mentioned, the Quest part of the game isn't anything to boast about. In fact, it's VERY VERY hard. Don't be mistaken that the first level's always the easiest. In fact, it's just the opposite. Some early enemies deal a lot of damage, and you'll find yourself facing more than 1 at one go. Other times, during the later part of the game, you might just face off against one hard enemy, which is easier than it sounds. Be prepared to re-load your saved games a lot, especially when you cannot see your sword arm properly due to the camera suddenly stuck between Enric's head and the wall It's not all bad, though. There are interesting moments, like fighting while hanging upside down from a rope in the early game; or having to cut down tentacles to make your way through. None of the enemies really make any sense in being there, except for being sword fodder, but hey, there's nothing wrong with having more enemies to cut down The swordplay is also the most solid I've ever seen in a video game. Thanks to the freeform style of VSIM, swordfighting is as realistic as it gets in a video game. Are you sick of getting games like The Force Unleashed, where attacks are done by button mashing and look unrealistic in every sense? Well then, DBTS is for you! Whether you're attacking or parrying, it's all under your control. There's no "fixed" pattern for you to use. If you're feeling agile and alert, and that ogre is making life miserable for you, well parry his attack and quickly sidestep to inflict tons of damage on him without getting yourself hit. Or is the skeleton defending itself particularly well? Why not try your luck and see if your jump attack has enough momentum to break past its parry? When you use mouse VSIM, this is when you can be prepared for some really epic battles. If DBTS had modern graphics, I'll bet Youtube would be flooded with movies of "epic battles" in no time at all Last but not least, the game's worth it's weight (or filesize) in money, thanks to the Arena mode. Here, you can pit yourself against the AI or other player opponents. You can select any character you want to be, from the default Enric to the mighty Ogre. You can even download custom maps online (though there aren't a lot) to play in. It's very fun to test your mettle and swordplay skills in custom arenas, and better still if you can get your friends to play too DBTS is a game that is frustratingly hard, but that's no reason to avoid it. It's like playing your first RPG when you're a kid - difficult to learn, difficult to master, but once you get the hang of the controls, you're ready to tackle the game As a final note, if you think the graphics really suck hard, and find yourself constantly nauseatic while playing the game, I suggest checking out the forum thread on DBTS mods. I've posted a way to get higher res graphics working. It won't have a magical effect, but at least it makes the game look somewhat better

This game is just awesome. Melees are brutal, as one well-placed hit can sever a limb (and sometimes a head!), and powerful hits can knock fighters off their feet. It can get a bit quirky when weapons get mashed up close; weapons will get caught on each other, build up tension like a bungee-cord, and then whip out and chop apart anything in its path. This is from the nature of the game having it so that weapons can collide with each other, which when used skillfully can mean parrying a potentially lethal blow (OGRES). This game has a reputation for being tricky to learn and control, but that's because it is the -only- game with an interface of this nature. No other melee game I know of lets you directly control the path of your blade in combat, and the damage your weapon generates is based purely on kinetics. If you swing from right to left while you also -turn your body- from right to left, the motion of the body combines with the motion of the arm producing a more powerful swing. So understand, it will first be tricky to control moving your body and weapon in synch. But once you do...there's a crazy Quest mode that awaits! You play as Enric, a stout and keen warrior, in pursuit of rescuing his lover Maya. She has been captured by evil beasts who have only nefarious intentions, and as you chase them further into the depths of their mountain lair things become more dangerous, and treacherous! Kobolds, Orcs, Ogres, Skeletons, beasts made from fire, with traps and trickery abound. One feature I personally liked in this mode is that they offer different opportunities to completing levels and solving encounters, but only to those who are as keen as Enric! Once Quest mode has been conquered (or conquered you!), there's also Arena mode. It allows you to configure a battle-royale style combat in which you can play as ANY character found in the DBtS game, with multiple game modes, conditions, and handicaps. Try this craziness: Pit of Insanity / King of the Hill / Full Health to Killer / 100 points / 4 Combatants (one of which ought to be a minotaur). The game is also configured for multiplayer support, though I think given the gap in time there may be a bit to do with things such as port-forwarding. ANOTHER awesome feature this game comes with is a Move Editor. With such control over the motion of the body and weapon, it gets to be that some moves are either too-tricky to execute ideally in the middle of combat, or you might have a favorite move you wish to execute repeatedly (this is what the Arcade keyboard controls cater to), or maybe you want your character to sheathe their weapon and make a friendly gesture: this lets you do it all! It lets you make portions of the move independently, and then combines all the independent motions together. It also tells you in which frame of the move the most force is generated, and points a marker to the point in space where that force is applied. Now you can do that crazy-awesome somersault-decapitation maneuver! The best feature of this in my opinion is that it lets you overwrite the preset moves for any character in the game, which is fun to do after having played through it once already. Why? Consider it like this: -Recreate the moves for each character in the game -Optimize the moves for high damage, and striking in critical directions (such as diagonals, and straight up and down) -Now all of the enemies in the game, and arena, will use the moves you created. The more punishing the moves, the more challenging the gameplay! Though you can also use moves which do more blocking instead, and those can be extremely useful as well. TLDR : A very fun and innovative melee combat game unlike any other. It gives you control over the range of motion for your weapon arm for precise strikes. Quest mode, arena mode, and move editor!

Let’s get this out of the way; many things about Die by the Sword are either dated, mediocre or both. The visuals are an eye sore, with low polygon models wearing muddy textures. Navigating the environment is clunky and the story is virtually non-existent, aside from the occasionally humorous cutscene. The two Quests (one added by the included expansion) consist of now extremely generic gameplay; run around caves, fight enemies, jump on platforms, solve simple puzzles. All stuff we’ve seen countless times already. That said, the game does have something not seen anywhere else (apart from an old Apple II game that inspired it); controlling the characters body movement and weapon movement separately. There is a steep learning curve behind this, and for a long time the player will be swinging weapons around like the drunk who voiced the main character, but with patience and practice, eventually they will be able to severe limbs with ease. It’s this unique control system that makes the game. It’s for this reason that the Arena and Tournament modes are better than the Quest modes. There is no adventuring here, it’s all focused on combat, where this game excels. Tournament has the player facing against increasingly powerful foes in various arenas, seeing how skilled they really are. It's a lot of fun, but the Arena mode is where the real action is. It's where a mantis can be knocked across the room by a lava golem, three skeletons can gang up on a minotaur who knocks them off a platform onto a mass of whirling blades and ogres bat around kobolds in an impromptu game of two-on-two hockey. A dwarf can (somehow) behead an orc on a bridge above lava, while a knight swears at everyone. The player can choose their character and weapon in both the Arena and Tournament modes. So I can half recommend this game for sporting a feature so unique, and including modes that make the most of it. Just remember that the control system does take some time to master. And even if you do master it, it's still a little clunky... but it's very possible to become good at it!

"Die by the Sword" and its expansion "Limb From Limb" were the 2 first PC game disk I have owned. In fact, I also learned about what were "expansion" disks back as I purchased the expansion before the base game. To put it in simple terms, the melee combat system in Die by the Sword is still, to this day, the most complex non-VR melee combat system to exist. There are multiple ways of controlling your attacks from using your mouse to control the movement of the weapon, use pre-registered attack pattern with shortkeys (this version uses numpad, but the original version used F1-F9 keys) or use the Move editor that comes with the game (you got to look up the .exe file in the installed files). (Note that I don't know if the move editor exists with the GoG version, but it did with the disk version.) The move editor is an hell to use because you basically put "muscle" action (bones movements) with the whole character's armature, meaning you need to animate many dozens of parts of the limbs for every attack you wish to impliment. It's also light-physics-based such as to "jump", you need to animate the torso down and move it up fast enough to create force upward. (Back in the days, it took me 3 whole days to make a backflip animation with the base character.) The combat uses a mix of base HP meter and body-part durability. You can loose 1 leg (which make you unable to run and limb around slower on 1 leg) and both of your arm (which make you unable to fight). Food magically restore your limbs too. Loosing both legs or your head is instant death. If you tough that the Souls series is the hardest, you haven't tried Die by the Sword. On top of the adv. combat, it's basically like playing Prince of Persia (the first one, not the Ubisoft one) in 3D with packs of enemies which, each, have at least half to 5x of your damages and/or health with barely any healing item hidden on the floor around. The traps are almost all instant death and some requires frame-precision controls.

This was the first game that let you absolutely control your sword, but the only way to truly do it - and many didn't know this - was by using a joystick. It was a little cumbersome from the beginning, because you had to learn to use a movement system within a movement system, that is, movement of the sword hand and torso with joystick while moving the body with the keyboard. But once you got the hang of it, the game became more than you could ever expect it to be! You could block upper, middle and low strikes and then decide to give a critical blow to the head or the leg... The movement of the whole body combined with an arm swing in the same direction would add up to produce an extremely powerful blow. So if you spun your body with keys and then follow up with a raised arm swing, you could even chop the head of your opponent in a single controlled blow and end the fight! Another extremely fun aspect of this game was the most creative cursing I've ever heard from a game character. Try to imagine a half-drunk barbarian from the middle ages cussing at an axe-wielding pig. The wild sense of humor made me adore this game. There was even an add-on curse pack for the game to add even more funny phrases your guy could shout at his opponents. Wonderful and unforgettable gem of a game!