sWORD MASTER Reviews

Decent concept but very simplified.

"sWORD MASTER" is what looks like a mobile app in the wrong store. It's a basic word puzzle game, essentially just a ripoff of the tabletop game, Boggle. You're presented with a 4x4 grid of 16 letters and must create words from adjacent letters. Just like Boggle, longer words and words with less commonly used letters generate a higher score. The "gimmick" is that your score then "damages" an enemy, who in turn will make a word that damages you in return. This is incredibly shallow as far as games go, the whole thing might as well have been done in a web browser. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all). Regardless, for all intents and purposes "sWORD MASTER" might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. One of the driving elements of this shovelware game is "achievement spam", that is to say the game features a ridiculously large number of trivial/automatically granted achievements, 348 of them, in fact. It's a damning indictment for this shovelware that people only bought it for easy achievements, and not because it has any serious merit as a real game. "sWORD MASTER" is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

Quite good word game, which supports also few other languages than English, which is quite unique. 7/10. At first, I found it a bit boring, but it has 300+ achievements, ca. half by passing the 25 levels in normal and + mode, and the remaining half if you spell certain countries, which can be quite challenging for 8 letter countries... which is quite rewarding to hunt them down. So with the right attitude, you can get quite some fun out of it. Played it for 20h. Deserves more attention than only 7 reviews in total.

A fun word game to kill some time; 10 minutes or an hour at a time. There are some minor bugs here or there and some questionable UI/menu decisions, but generally doesn't have a huge impact on playability.

It is an easy to learn and play game. Not hugely challenging but it is possible to fail! It has been fun so far.

This is officially for linguists with RPG-hearted soul love it, so many hard-to-get achievements lol

Well, if you own all the other word games on Steam then maybe get this. If you don't, get the other worthwhile ones first. Not enough effort was put into this game, even at the low price of $3. What do the items do? What do the symbols do exactly? Why are there 348 achievements? What do the colored squares do? Why can I buy more than one of each of the equipment if I can't sell them back or equip more than one at a time? What is behind the locked item screen under equipped items? Why are the menus so shitty when it comes to buying items? Why is New Game+ unlocked at the start? Why did you use the system to differentiate hard mode from normal mode with the New Game+ button? Why are the "grades" you get on each level such a fucking miserably excuse of a system? Why is there dodging...? Some of those can be answered in the screenshot section of the game now that I look. You can equip two swords at once. Faries or something seem to be behind the locked screen in the equip tab. I think you get my point.