Swords and Serpents
System: NES
Release Date: August 1990
Developer: Interplay Entertainment
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Genre: RPG
Delve deep into a labyrinth to free the area of evil in Swords and Serpents! The haunted maze has 16 levels of twisted corridors, mind bending puzzles, and uncountable battles. Have your band of four adventurers watch each others back and work together to slay the Serpent. Or die trying…
You can either choose to take a pregenerated party, complete with framing story in the manual, or create your own. As you roll your character, they can have anywhere between 2 and 14 in the attributes strength, intelligence, and agility. Roll as many times as you’d like, but when you decide the stats are good enough for you, you can choose from three classes. A Warrior, benefiting most from strength for hard hits. A Magician wants high intelligence for a lot of magic points. The Thief wants agility and strength. I settled on creating the Mack family, with Georg the Warrior, Berta and Gert the Magicians, and Boy the Thief.
The dungeon doesn’t take it easy on you, throwing you into battle very quickly. It took me awhile to figure out that it is a truly turn based system in combat. I had believed that it was an active time system, but was wrong. Attacking is a push of the A Button and you can add a modifier to attack the head by pressing up or the legs by pressing down. I found the head attack less likely to hit, but stronger. Some enemies may also be weak to attacks to a certain area. Magicians can cast a spell on their turn by pressing the B Button to bring up their spell list. Taking two magicians was the right call for me, because they were casting Heal nonstop. If you walk into a battle you don’t think you can win, or just don’t want to fight, pressing the Select Button allows you to run from battle with ease.
Experience and gold are won from battles, so you don’t want to run away from too many. I didn’t find gold to be too useful during my playthrough. Once I bought a Plus 2 Sword for my Warrior, I didn’t use gold again. It didn’t really help that better equipment is periodically dropped by enemies. Healing is free in the temple. Any individual battle isn’t too dangerous, unless you aren’t paying attention, but it’s the accumulation of all the fights that will get you in trouble. If you need to head back to the temple, you need to run away a lot, or find a Zoom Tube. These things are great if you want them, but not so much if you don’t.
There’s a nice auto-map, but only the latest two floors stay in memory. Once you head back to the first floor, it’s all gone. I had my trusty graph paper next to me and mapped the first seven levels. There were a lot of false walls that I stumbled through in order to figure out puzzles presented. The quest in the first half of the game is to collect all of the Ruby equipment, of which I snagged many pieces. Once I stepped on level 8, I realized I was about seven hours in and less than halfway through. With great hesitance, I threw in the towel, as I didn’t see much new on the horizon.
Graphics: 2.5
The interface and dungeon walls are nothing special, but I did like the monster portraits.
Sound: 2.0
I ran into an exploration song and a battle song. They weren’t great and the sound effects were nothing special.
Gameplay: 2.5
There were times when I wanted things to move more quickly than they did. Battles, in particular, had the ability to drag on.
Difficulty: 3.0
I think the dungeon is mostly fair, as long as you keep your levels and equipment up. The manual warns you must have a Magician to win the game.
Fun Factor: 3.0
I actually enjoyed myself a great deal and would have probably kept going if I thought there would be something new coming my way in the dungeon.
Overall Rating: 2.6
Swords and Serpents earns a B-. If I had to choose between this and Wizardry, I’d pick this. That’s saying a lot.