About Sword Factory X:
I’ve been a longtime fan of the Sword and Fairy franchise, going back to the first game that started it all on DOS. I wouldn’t call myself a diehard fan or anything like that, but I’ve kept my interest in the franchise going over the years as games and dramas come out one after another. Let’s get the good out of the way. The series in terms of graphical presentation has come a long way. This game is absolutely gorgeous in every area with RTX enabled and DLSS does maintain the framerate quite well. The soundtrack, while a bit light on tracks is decent. Instrumentation is excellent and the music does add to the overall presentation and give you a sense of belonging. Character models are very well animated and the in-game cutscenes are also well made. And…here comes the not-so-good. The game is 100% linear, you don’t have any influence on anything and invisible walls are present everywhere. The plot is very, very cliche and you pretty much knew exactly what was going to happen the first few hours into the game. It is also quite short, I’ve done all but one sidequest and only clocked in less than 30 hours. There is virtually no customization, equipment progression is very clear and you don’t really have to put in any thought as it’s more or less just hit them and dodge their attacks, and the AI isn’t really that difficult in combat to go against. The puzzles are pretty well designed, there is one mini (card) game that you can play and it just feels like Sword & Fairy 7 basically took AAA graphical quality and mashed other proven JRPG ideas together into a very short, cliche and crunched game. Performance can be absolutely awful with RTX enabled in parts, you experience massive drops and every now and then unforgiveable bugs happen, like the boss won’t die after fully depleting its HP, hitting Quit instead saves and so on.
