IronSword: Wizards & Warriors II (NES) Review

IronSword: Wizards & Warriors II is part of this big family of video games whose cover art was a blatant lie. No, really! Google it and what you'll see will be the sword-wielding cheap-romance-novel-cover-model Fabio in Conan the Barbarian attire, a scorched land with a volcano, and a beautiful, cloudy sky with God rays coming from within it in the distance. Corny? Sure, but it also looks cool. The problem? It pumps you up for an epic, fantasy hack 'n' slasher, when this is nothing more than an aggravating platformer.

Once again, this fails at offering a knight worth his salt. Kuros holds a sword, but he mainly attacks by jumping towards foes and hoping the tip of his weapon will touch them, something that'll lead to a lot of frustration. In other words, like the first one in the series, this is mainly a platformer, and the enemies are mostly there to be avoided, not killed - not to mention that there's little meaning in doing so, as they come in never-ending waves.

Other than that, IronSword is actually the better game. While the original was pretty much the same from beginning to end, this actually feels like an adventure that manages to give a sense of progress, whereas Wizards & Warriors was an arcade-y platformer at heart. Furthermore, while far from a giant leap, this also looks and sounds better, with levels that are more varied, and tunes that are longer and catchier - especially the epic main theme.

Better doesn't mean good, though, and this is far from one. For starters, while it's not as formulaic as the first, it is so too. Each world is always divided between two sections, something that goes like this: find a certain item to give to this level's animal ally to move to the second part of the chapter, and then find the spell to kill the head honcho of the world - killing it means you can now move the next level, but only after you've grabeth a piece of the lamest sword ever. Obviously, all this makes things feel quite repetitive.

An even bigger problem, however, is the level design itself, which, like almost everything else, is a bit better, it's also far more treacherous. Yes, this is once again a tough game, but not in the right way as, instead of requiring from you to improve on your skills, it wants you to learn the game by trial-and-error. Oh, and by the way, remember the infinite continues of the original? These are infinite in here two… but for some reason they disappear near the very end, something that renders them kind of useless.

In conclusion: putting those nostalgia glasses aside, and although this somewhat smooths out some of the many rough edges of Wizards & Warriors, it hasn't really helped in improving the series, as it remains a clunky, repetitive, and annoying action-platformer. It definitely has some retro charm, but a true classic video game is one that doesn't solely rely on that - not even a cult one.