The Siege and the Sandfox Review (Rhudda)
This is one of those games that could be really good, but it's held back by quite a few serious bugs.
Graphics:
The game is full of beautiful pixel art, especially the views of the desert when you're high up in the map. However, those views feel like there should be more there. In the beginning of the game you see the besieging army march towards the city, so I feel like they should show up at least as campfire in the night when the desert is visible.
The animations are nice and fluid - I especially like how sprites who carry a weapon in one hand swap it to the other hand when they turn around so there's kind of a justification to the sprite mirroring. Really neat. The quality of the animations makes it particularly jarring that one seems to have been forgotten: Whenever you hang from a ledge and jump away from it, your sprite just goes from being still to moving at a rapid pace - no pushing off of a wall or anything like that.
Sound:
The audio is okay. It's quite easy to pinpoint where someone is moving around just by listening (there is also a UI element showing you the direction and distance to sounds when you're staying still, just in case). Still, there's some jank here, too. The guards through most of the game seem to be male, and they all make the same sounds. That's not the problem, even though you'll hear a lot of yawning throughout your journey. The problem is that there are female guards in one part of the map, and they sound exactly the same. I kept thinking there were more guards around the corner until I saw a guard yawn and produce the exact same sound as their male counterpart.
The music isn't bad, but I think there is one point where the music should change or at least isn't intended to be playing all the time. There are collectable music sheets that you have to get to specific musicians. When they get them, they seem excited to play something new, but the music stays the same. This is either a bug or a missed opportunity.
The story:
It's nothing special, but serviceable. There's a nice twist that is hinted at if you pay attention to the dialogue, and at least two pieces of dialogue make no sense until after the reveal. Unless you're sharp enough to guess the twist, I guess. Well done, you!
The bad part here is that the narrator doesn't use names when introducing characters, so during the "where are they now" portion of the epilogue I wasn't always sure who was who when the they started using names.
Also, the dialogue sometimes seems out of sequence, most noticeable when you're told about a storm and what to do about it. You leave and immediately see said storm, with the narrator treating it as if it hadn't been mentioned before.
Enemy variety:
It's quite low. There are several factions, but they're mostly made up of the same three types: enemy with a torch, enemy without a torch, big bruiser that can't be knocked out by normal means. Sporadically you'll find other enemies: the aforementioned female guards are quite different, and there are supernatural and teleporting guards that break up the pace. Still, it would have been nice to have more faction specific guards with their own behaviours and abilities.
The bugs:
Speaking of guard behaviour: It's borked quite frequently. Guards will investigate suspicious activity and sounds, but sometimes break and just stand still with the alert meter never going down. Sometimes a guard will stand in place and rapidly turn left and right, spamming lines about something suspicious going on. And if you alert a guard and manage to hide in one of the places they can reach, but can't touch (like inside a box they patrol past), the guard will just stand next to it at full alert. They won't calm down or move. If the intention was to make these hiding places impossible to use to escape, the guards should drag you out and kill you instead of just waiting there, and if the intent was to be able to shake them like that, they should reset fairly quickly. Otherwise the game's just at a stalemate with you having to either reload the last checkpoint or come out, die, then reload the last checkpoint.
The controls are often a bit unresponsive, especially during animations. There doesn't seem to be an input queue for some actions.
Some collectables cannot be interacted with at all.
More than a month after release, the only news from the devs is that they're collecting feedback to learn what they need to fix. I'm sure they're a small studio and don't have that much of a budget, but surely a hotfix for the worst bugs should have been delivered quickly to make the game sell more to get money to fix more bugs. You don't have to fix everything in one go, Cardboard Sword!
If they fix the game, I'll give it another try to get the rest of the achievements and collectables. I'll also change my review to positive. That is, if they patch it while it's still on my radar.