En Garde! is a 3D swashbuckling action videogame that emphasizes crowd control and mastery over the environment to see the player character to victory across dozens of unique combat challenges. I play as Adalia de Volador, an aristocratic young woman living in 17th century Spain who has already forged her own legend as a fencer. I follow her through four everyday adventures as she uses her prowess with a rapier to battle the greedy Count-Duke and his corrupt soldiers, duel her rival, the hapless fop El Vigilante, and spar with her crush, the lady pirate Zaida. It’s a light-hearted romp that draws as much from the adventure films of Errol Flynn as the myth of French duelist Julie d’Aubigny.
En Garde! is almost totally focused on its combat mechanics. Adalia has some impressive acrobatic skill she uses to leap from rooftop to rooftop and swing between rafters and balconies. These sequences are always short, with few interactable elements and little to explore. En Garde!’s Spain is not a world where Adalia can get lost or spend hours fumbling with puzzles. The light platforming sequences punctuate the combat setpieces where the heroine excels, like commas connecting the many exciting battles of her autobiography.
Adalia’s nimbleness is translated into simple and clear controls. Individual buttons are responsible for each action she can take in combat. A single button is assigned to make her dodge away from enemy attacks with a swift slide. Another button tells her to jump over enemy heads to the top of a nearby table or crate. Other buttons are assigned to seize an item from the environment, kick out with her foot, swing her rapier, and counter enemy attacks.
Countering is central to En Garde!’s combat. As has become familiar in the recent design zeitgeist, Adalia’s response to an oncoming attack is prompted by colored flourishes emitted from her enemies’ weapons as they swing. An airy blue circle means the attack may be countered. An angry red cross means the attack is too powerful to be countered and must be dodged. Both attack types appear in rapid patterns by several soldier varieties, requiring quick responses to endure them all. The windows for performing either maneuver are surprisingly wide. On a few occasions I even manage to fumble into a counter or a dodge after I’ve already pressed an attack button too many times. En Garde! asks for my precision but is forgiving with my errors.
With every strike Adalia lands with her rapier, she builds the yellow Panache meter beneath her hit points. Adalia may spend filled chunks of Panache to unleash a powered up version of her attacks. A powerful stab overwhelms a single opponent. A spinning attack forces a crowd of enemies away from Adalia. A mighty kick will send a soldier flying across the room. Using these abilities also restores one of Adalia’s hit points. These many options and factors add a great deal of strategy to using Panache. Knowing when, where, and which ability to use can be decisive in a close matchup.
Actually harming enemies is where En Garde! is at its most complicated. The Count-Duke’s soldiers Adalia faces earliest in her adventures are the most straightforward. Each is equipped with a stamina meter and one or more hit points. Striking an enemy with Adalia’s rapier drains their stamina. If she can whittle down their stamina to nothing, the next strike she deals will remove a hit point. If they have remaining hit points, their stamina meter will refill and Adalia must repeat the process. If all their hit points are drained, they fall defeated to the ground, though still able to call out comments with varying levels of venom as the heroine moves on.
Adalia encounters more durable enemies who introduce new layers to the stamina system as her adventures go on. Captains are the first such enemy. These large soldiers enter the fray with a blue shield enveloping their stamina meter. No matter how many times Adalia strikes a Captain, their stamina will never drain. The only way to remove their shield is to apply the Weaken effect.
When Adalia correctly responds to every move in a soldier’s attack string, they enter a brief surprised state signified by a golden exclamation point above their head. While surprised, soldiers are vulnerable to Adalia’s standard kick. Kicks deal no damage but can send a soldier stumbling across the environment. If they stumble off an edge, down a flight of stairs, or into specially placed objects like weapon racks or delicately balanced pottery, they enter a weakened state. While weakened, they are unable to deflect Adalia’s attacks, letting her quickly wear down their stamina meters. This is the only way to harm Captains at all, though all enemies are vulnerable to these tactics.
Adalia’s skill with a rapier is more than a match for any foe in a one-on-one fight. Unfortunately for her, she rarely encounters just one enemy, and they are more than happy to gang up on her. Countering or dodging attacks from one enemy at a time is easy with a little practice and concentration. Countering or dodging attacks from two or three enemies at once is practically impossible. As Adalia progresses through the four episodes, completing battles becomes as much about controlling the crowd as dispatching them with her rapier.
Conveniently for Adalia, almost every space she battles in is strewn with objects she can use to help her against overwhelming numbers. Stacks of crates or barrels may be kicked into her pursuers, sending soldiers flying in all directions. Buckets and roast turkeys may be tossed at soldiers’ heads, where they stick cartoonishly, blinding their target and removing them from battle for a few precious seconds. Adalia can wholly embody her Errol Flynn inspirations by releasing the ropes supporting a chandelier, sending it crashing down onto pursuing enemy soldiers.
Some throwable objects even interact. A lantern tossed at a cannon will cause it to fire, devastating all who stand in front of its barrel. A bomb is a destructive object on its own; when tossed into a cauldron, the vessel turns it into a meteoric cannonball that permanently removes the soldier it lands upon. There’s some strategy built into this; cauldrons will defeat even the most powerful of Adalia’s foes, so if she can keep a cauldron and bomb in play until only a boss remains, her battle is already over. A smart lock-on system automatically targets specialized projectiles with their related environmental objects, minimizing the frustration of picking out an exact target in a crowded room.
The junk that litters every battlefield is easy enough to ignore in the first episode. It’s fun to brain a soldier on the head with a goblet swiped from a table set for his afternoon meal but it’s possible, with finesse and effort, to push past enemy groups without using projectiles from the environment. When the Count-Duke’s most skilled soldiers are introduced, En Garde! forces me to engage with its crowd control mechanics to succeed.
Elites are especially skilled swordsmen whose talent is represented by a lightning bolt mark on their stamina meter. If Adalia makes a mistake or turns her attention away from them for even a moment, their stamina instantly refills. When two or more attack her at the same time, they create a loop of nonstop aggression. Every move Adalia takes to defend herself from one Elite restores another’s stamina, forever barring her from penetrating into their core hit points. The addition of these soldier types is transformative, turning En Garde!’s early engaging and predictable counter-fest into a desperate chase across the environment, grasping for a tool that will give the heroine the upper hand for a few precious seconds, just enough time to remove one soldier from the fight before the chase resumes.
I am introduced to all of these combat mechanics and the Count-Duke’s army of specialized soldiers over the course of a four episode Story mode. Though sharing recurring characters and themes, each episode tells a self-contained story, as though En Garde! is a weekly syndicated adventure show from the height of mass produced television. The first episode tells of Adalia’s confrontation with El Vigilante, a flamboyant and arrogant swordsman who, the user interface assures me, definitely isn’t her brother in disguise. Remaining episodes follow Adalia’s escape from a prison, her infiltration of the Count-Duke’s villa with the help of the pirate Zaida, and her search for a rumored treasure hoard in an abandoned fortress.
En Garde!’s narrative leaves me wanting more. It features charming heroes and amusingly detestable villains. I am especially interested in Adalia’s flirtatious relationship with Zaida. Adalia responds to every other character she meets with sass and a boastful one-liner. With Zaida, she becomes more awkward and demure. The pair admire each other’s skill even as they furiously duel to a standstill. Because the narrative is so brief, their relationship never develops beyond mutual admiration. I like Adalia and I want to see their flirtation develop into romance. En Garde!’s scant four episodes do not contain enough space to satisfy that desire.
Story Mode’s real weakness is its lamentable brevity. All four episodes may be finished in about three hours. I may be overly generous describing it as four episodes long. The first is basically a tutorial and much shorter than episodes two, three, and four. I don’t feel like I’m properly playing En Garde! until I begin its second episode.
Multiple difficulty levels and optional goals unique to each level entice me to replay them. A surprising number of documents litter Spain’s drawers, walls, and tabletops. These nominally fill in details about an episode’s conflict and its characters but most are so brief they don’t add much real context. Others are more interested in squeezing out a punchline than expanding the world. There are also challenges that require Adalia to defeat foes in a certain way or discover rooms and objects hidden around the space. None of these goals are particularly motivating, if only because they don’t seem to award anything.
The other major way to play is the Arena mode. Unlocked after completing the second episode, Arena mode presents four scenarios that drop Adalia in the middle of a battlefield against multiple waves of the Count-Duke’s soldiers. If Adalia can endure every wave across multiple arenas, then she wins that scenario and unlocks a more difficult one. Each scenario introduces more enemies, more arenas, and more bosses, and each must be completed in a single attempt. The final difficulty is a true test of skill and endurance and En Garde!’s highest skill peak to summit.
Even before the first battle begins, Arena mode throws its twist at me: Adalia is afflicted with a negative modifier. These can range from the alarming, like every defeated enemy dropping a lit bomb, to troublesome, like new soldiers appearing from destroyed crates, to the deadly, like some soldiers’ attacks stunning Adalia, leaving her vulnerable to additional attacks. Adalia’s negative modifiers persist across every wave and new ones are added at the start of each arena. By the final round, she can accumulate a perilous collection that turns every move she makes into a potentially deadly one.
Negative modifiers are offset by positive ones. I am presented with three before each arena and may pick the one I prefer most. Positive modifiers can be just as impactful as the negative ones, allowing Adalia to instantly defeat weakened enemies with a simple kick, turn almost every object in the arena into an explosive, and make her attacks and dodges flood the floor with liquid that cause soldiers to stumble when they cross. With a lucky enough modifier draw, Adalia can gain so many stacking healing effects that she becomes practically invulnerable. The difference between a disastrous Arena mode run and a perfect one often comes down to which positive modifiers are rolled.
En Garde!’s excellent fighting mechanics are sadly in search of a campaign worthy of their depth. At the start, I am delighted by the vibrant graphics and wonderful animations and fascinated by the combat’s depth. Mere hours later, I am dismayed that four self-contained story episodes and a luck-dependent arena mode is all there is to do. En Garde! is the kind of videogame that’s great to show off to friends for ten minutes or share in bite-sized video clips on the internet. As an experience for a player’s benefit, it cannot keep them engaged beyond the three to five hours it takes to finish the Story and Arena modes. It will be forgotten almost as fast. En Garde! is fun while it lasts, which is not long at all.