En Garde! Review – Panache and Swashbuckling Sass

The Batman: Arkham and Assassin’s Creed series are arguably best known for their gameplay. Both franchises, which feature one lone, brooding hero against armies of fodder-y goons and minions, manage to take advantage of their unique protagonists (arguably their greatest strengths) and translate their lone wolf nature into a unique form of one vs many fighting gameplay. The player, who would find themselves surrounded in every combat encounter, would navigate the crowd of enemies through well-timed counterattacks, dodging, attacks, and creating a unique kind of gameplay that made you feel like an expert martial artist methodically picking off hordes of untrained foes.

While this gameplay felt revolutionary at the time, it didn’t take long for players to realize that the daunting outnumbered battles could be simplified down to holding the parry button and spamming dodge. What’s more, this innovative mechanic began to sneak its way into more and more games, until it was practically a recognizable genre of its own. While arguably stale and definitely overdone, it remained as the best way to portray a single, heroic protagonist fighting off impossible odds without the use of superpowers or a gluttony of firearms.

Enter En Garde! which seems to have been created solely to disprove that last sentence. En Garde! takes inspiration from the influential titles that came before and switches up the formula, both innovating on the old gameplay in a way that makes things play and feel dramatically different and presenting the game’s vibrant world and characters in a way unlike the titles that came before.

Though the comparisons to other titles are not without merit and will make sense to any who have played them, En Garde! is far more than a spiritual successor to games like Assassin’s Creed and Arkham. It is a truly standout and unique title that deserves both applause for doing something better than the games that came before as well as recognition for being its own thing.

En Garde! follows the heroic Adalia de Volador across her swashbuckling adventures against villains such as the nefarious Count-Duke. You trapeze around a whimsical mock-up of a 16th-century Spanish city, fighting off foes with panache and more than a few clever and funny quips exchanged. The slapstick-heavy setting of En Garde! feels like a forgotten film from the Disney renaissance, and is the kind of highly original setting you don’t see in many games, especially the ones that most closely compare to En Garde!

Again, I want to compare the combat from the Arkham and Assassin’s Creed games, even though the comparison becomes less obvious in En Garde! the more you play it. It’s a comparison I couldn’t avoid making the second I got into the combat, which is what most of the game is about. I kept thinking about the level of detail and how other games could have been so much better with the same focus and care as En Garde! was given.

At face value, the combat in En Garde! will look familiar. The player will enter a scene full of enemies and won’t be able to progress until the enemies are taken care of. You’re given an attack button, a dodge button, and a counter button, and you will have to make use of each to effectively defeat your enemies. Foes are given the familiar warning indicator just before an attack will hit the player, and your camera automatically locks on to the closest enemy to you.

In another game with similar mechanics, you’d beat this stage by spamming the dodge button and lightly tapping each enemy to death until, slowly but surely, each one is dead. Trying that here is a good way to get to the Game Over screen quickly.

In En Garde!, with the exception of some, your enemies are smart and granted the exact same, if not more tools for winning a straight-ahead fight than you are. Hitting an enemy who isn’t stunned or who doesn’t have their guard broken more than once will trigger a counterattack, every time, so spamming attacks is not an option. Enemies are stronger in groups, and they will always try to be in one, gaining powerful attacks that can’t be dodged when they fight together and regaining health when they haven’t taken damage in a while. Jumping between foes is not an option here, and so your best choice of action is to separate groups and force little one on one duels, a far more realistic approach to the situation than in other titles.

Alone, enemies are no joke either. They still have combo attacks of their own, they will still counter attack you, and they often have multiple health bars. Each of their attacks requires specific command inputs in response, be it dodging or parrying, and you can’t use them interchangeably. You have to parry a blockable attack and you must dodge a dodge attack, demanding that you make full use of the game’s mechanics and your own reflexes.

All enemies have an advantage over Adalia, be it shields, explosives, or simply numbers. Your most powerful weapon is your clever use of the environment to separate groups and catch enemies off guard.

In true swashbuckling fashion, players can kick boxes, throw cups and buckets at the heads of soldiers, knock their foes down a flight of stairs, and even kick a table across the room at a group of enemies. The amount of interaction with the environment is remarkable, and makes the size of some of the areas feel even more impressive when you realize the abundance of interactable objects for you to make use of. What’s also impressive is that the enemies seem to learn from your tricks, and will duck and dodge out of the way if you try the same thing twice and throw teasing comments at you acknowledging your tricky tactics.

I lost a lot in En Garde!, and I mean a lot. I must have been the defeat screen more on the medium difficulty than most players will, even on their third or fourth playthrough. I never really had a problem being stuck in an area, however, as the mechanics presented to me always felt fair. I always had a way to learn from something I did wrong.

The game features four chapters, each of which will take you about an hour to complete. My personal favorite part was always the boss fights, which had incredibly set designs, fun music, and great banter between the charismatic characters. Once you’re done with the chapters, you can choose to replay them to complete challenges or head on over to Arena Mode for a different, customizable kind of challenge.

If I could summarize En Garde! in one word, it would be one I’ve already used multiple times in this review: Panache. The game is full of style, from its visuals to its smart and engaging gameplay to its witty banter and jokes, and it seems to know it. The confidence in the game’s presentation is staggering, as it deserves to be, because I truly don’t think there is anything else like En Garde! on the market right now.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! En Garde! is available on Steam.