We’ve had big swords in games. And yeah, they rule. They make their wielder that much cooler. Cloud Strife without the Buster Sword is nothing more than a perpetually emo kid with spiky hair. Sly, from Hollow Knight, must be hiding some absolutely jacked arms under that cape. Sora with the Keyblade remains exceptionally iconic. This paragraph could be its own article.
But what about Ezra? Maybe Ezra, the protagonist of Gigasword, doesn’t quite lift his giant sword with the same grace as Cloud or Sly or many others. But heaving the titular Gigasword around is one of the most engaging and defining parts of the game.
Gigasword is a Metroidvania, through and through. Puzzling through areas with the Gigasword is where the blade cuts sharpest. There’s no shortage of mechanics as you traverse and then retrace areas, but they all return to the size of the sword. It’s heavy, and you can see that with the dust and sparks that burst from one of its edges as it’s dragged along behind Ezra.
You’ll often have to leave the sword behind since it functions as a literal weight. You can also plant the sword into the ground to gain increased mobility and height while jumping. The downside here is obvious: you can’t engage in combat without a weapon. It’s this fundamental shift between playstyles that makes Gigasword’s puzzle rooms stand out in a line of lookalikes. Jack Breen, the game’s primary developer, seems to have a firm handle on knowing when to shift between the two modes. You’re often leaving your sword behind while you leap over gaps to turn gears or access chests. You’re equally spending time hacking your way through hallways of enemies. The two modes overlap, but in ways that weren’t overbearing. Less often you’ll dodge-roll, while weaponless, your way through monsters to unlock a door or reach some other objective.
As you acquire abilities, they largely build in tandem with the two divergent playstyles. I found each new iteration refreshing, although maybe overdone. As I drew to a close with my time playing Gigasword (some 14 hours with substantial exploration), later mechanics were engaging but lost their charm as you fight towards the finale. This is due in part to the game’s story emphasising a specific narrative urgency that was at odds with how the game itself progressed. More than that, while the later mechanics reflect Breen’s smart game design, some of them felt like Gigasword had a bit of an identity crisis, adding more layers rather than rounding out or polishing the well-developed mechanics already in play.
In the same measure there were many epiphanies as you utilize these mechanics to make progress, but they were matched by blank-brain moments where locating a key to unlock a door forward meant it was tucked away in an obscure corner, or accessible by manipulating a mechanic via discovery or trial and error. Gigasword is much more old school than its peers in this way. You’ve got to explore every corner, try to combine your skills creatively to discover the path forward, and be okay without much explanation.
The game’s narrative pacing recalls older games too. Spending 20 or so minutes in exposition surprised me, as I’m now used to getting into the action within seconds with most contemporary games. Gigasword uses the initial half hour or so to set up stakes for Ezra, an orphaned human, and his relationship with Omari, an owl humanoid from the Nestrium. The two races are at odds with each other. The humans believe that Omari’s kind are keeping a powerful treasure from them that could grant them prosperity, and in a time of famine, Vearst, the game’s antagonist, attacks the Nestrium in order to take this power for himself. As Ezra seeks out Omari after the initial strike, the game reveals a deep history of the Nestrium and Ezra’s role in it.
I think many, if not most, will be turned off by the delay to getting into the action. I personally enjoyed it. It’s engaging, it establishes themes clearly and early on, and it gives me emotional buy-in for what’s happening. The narrative development is uneven as you progress, but I was rooting for Ezra the whole way through. Omari serves as a guide for Ezra as you traverse the Nestrium, but you’ve to be paying close attention to what he says, as direction is given in quick, one-liner guidance on where to go next.
Figuring that out, even with vague clues, I had to rely on experimenting with my abilities to figure out how to access new areas. An early example I’ll allude to is learning how to manipulate your jump while carrying the Gigasword. As mentioned already, the distances you clear are shorter when jumping with the sword in hand. However, there is a way to give you just a tad more clearance to make gaps that seem impossible actually attainable. Once you figure this out, it’s a wave of relief and empowerment that enables you, and it’ll be necessary for the remainder of the game. This happened several times, and I had mixed results. Sometimes I was left scratching my head before eventually stumbling into a solution.
Beyond getting more abilities, you can upgrade your sword, which arguably made a greater impact on your moment-to-moment gameplay. At save checkpoints, you can spend the game’s currency, ore, to activate combat abilities. There are four general nodes that can each be levelled up once. Folks, these break the game wide open.
Without revealing too much, I’ll just say that early weapon abilities allow you to fire off projectiles. Your enemies don’t stand a chance. The early to mid-game offers little resistance if you keep your health up and your abilities at the fore of your combat repertoire. For the most part, I thought this was fine because it mitigated what is otherwise slow and stiff combat.
Again, this is a massive sword, and you’re just a regular guy. Ezra can only swing the sword so fast, and he’s locked into an attack animation as it begins. I never found this to be too much of an issue. Whenever I got greedy against tough enemies or bosses, I felt like the hits I took were deserved. Monsters are calibrated to the same, slow speed, but more than anything, since, again, big sword, you can stagger every enemy.
That’s right. Bosses better watch out. If you time your swing so it lands just before a boss attack, you’ll get a split second of time back to follow up with another attack or roll away. You won’t get away with stunlocking most foes, but fights can be significantly sped up if you’re quickly taking mental notes on boss patterns. I loved this. In Gigasword, the best defence is a good offence and being ahead of the curve of the monsters you fight. I didn’t realise until much later into the game the lack of any real defence options outside of a dodge-roll or jump.
I did notice this in the late game, though. When hallways become chokepoints and enemies jump away, float above you, or tank more than three hits, the dodging feels lacking as your only defensive manoeuvre. Notably, like many of its peers, there’s no parry. I think Gigasword committing to the fact that the sword is too heavy to use swiftly made more sense for the slower combat than adding in a parry. However, I was surprised that there wasn’t a block in there. Luckily, you got the ol’ reliable tactic for some of these combat-intense rooms: running past enemies. While I wished for a block at times, I could hoof it through rooms that looked too intimidating.
The bosses scattered throughout the game, and they did seem far apart, were the real highlights for combat. I really enjoyed putting the sword upgrades to the test, and boss designs came with failsafes from cheesing them or exploiting staggers. Although the combat over time grew stale, the bosses improved as I continued through the game, with more engaging aesthetics, attacks, and unique mechanics.
Gigasword adds another oversized weapon to the list of cool, exaggerated swords. It has its share of hiccups, but overall I enjoyed uncovering the secrets of the Nestrium and puzzling my way towards the big showdown at the end of the game. To put it simply: big sword, big win.
