![]() ![]() Hellish Quart features incredible graphics and beautiful environments. ![]() You better be careful, because if the stab is accurate enough it only takes one for a killing blow. Slice and stab at your opponent hard enough that they drop their sword, or even take their limbs off with a clean cut. It is a highly realistic physics-based 3D sword dueling simulator. For an austere game, this is secretly a bit of a charmer.Hellish Quart lets you duel with shining scimitars and polished long swords in the 17th century. I am far too clumsy to ever take something like this up for real, but it's been a delight to fire up the current build and at least get a slight sense of it. I love the idea of games as little rock pools of interest, little communities of people who are passionate, knowledgeable and committed. This isn't typical video game violence - in its slicing it feels sort of real. This is hardly a surprising insight, but I was still shocked the first time blood flew through the air and sprayed across my character's face. ![]() What I get from this mostly is that sword fighting must have been really painful. A few minutes ago I started in by pressing the wrong button and watched as my guy held his sword back and sort of presented his empty hand so the opponent could obligingly lob it off. Sometimes I get a hit in, but most of the time I don't. I wobble into battle swinging wildly and against all but the most basic AI I am swiftly despatched. Somebody is really, really into swordfighting. I load up this game and the commitment is obvious. It's hard to capture while fighting!Ĭhris: I am completely up for Hellish Quart, because it's just passion innit? Developers going deep on something that I assume they care very deeply about. There are other stages, and other fighters. But who cares? The swordplay is the point. Outside of the core swordplay, it's clunky as hell. Hellish Quart is nowhere near the finished product - it's in Steam Early Access with the option of a free demo - nor is it a game with great resources behind it. And in doing so, it makes you look and feel like a believable fighter even when you've only just picked up the game. It doesn't make you invulnerable of course, but if you're positioned well and have your sword in front of you, it fends off a lot of attacks. Unlike in other realism-focused sword-fighting games, you don't have to try and block entirely by yourself, which is always the clumsiest part of these games. And the secret to it feeling good, and it does feel good, is a kind of auto-block system. Instead, there's a lot of swords scraping on swords, and what feel like accidental wins as you slice an enemy that moves onto your blade, or vice versa.īut it's not clumsy like a Chivalry-like game. Usually, one solid hit kills (no one is armoured), so leaving yourself vulnerable is the game's biggest crime. It's a fighting game built around the concept of realistic swordplay. Watch on YouTube Ah, Bertie makes it look effortless! Not like that, you filthy people! And Hellish Quart gets this. And most importantly of all: you do not expose yourself. It's not hyar-hyar-hyar as you chop up a Hollywood set and kick over some scenery, but circling, probing, and feeling out your opponent before you try an attack. Oh listen to me! Bertie reckons he's an expert. And usually attacks are one or two moves strung together around an economical movement, and then you back off, or you get so close you can't swing, so you hilt-strike or unbalance the opponent instead. The biggest difference, even with a big, heavy sword like a longsword, is there's a lot more feeling the other blade and sliding around on them, rather than wild slicing. I didn't go for very long, only a few months, but what developed in that time was an appreciation for the actual art of sword fighting, the fundamentals, and how different it is to what we see in games. ![]()
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