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Review
(I played the demo version of this game.)
The Sword of Voldiir is an entry in the venerable category of computer games that are trying to emulate Dungeons & Dragons. It is a choice-based game in which you are a member of a group of adventurers which is tasked with finding the titular sword, only for the journey to go unexpectedly awry. As is customary for this type of game, your PC is heavily customizable, and you can choose to romance any of your fellow party members.
While I don’t shy away from giving negative feedback, I do usually try to be a bit more lenient with IF reviews than I would with, say, a published book or a commercial game (even an indie one). This is a hobby community and we’re all having fun and sharing our works for free. But the free version of Sword of Voldiir is a demo for a full game that costs money, and as such I’m inclined to hold it to a slightly higher standard, since the question the review is addressing is no longer simply “is it worth your time?” but “is it worth your time and money?” All of which is to say, this review is harsher than I’m inclined to be for free IF, and I apologize for that in advance.
The bones of Sword of Voldiir, as it were, are perfectly fine. There’s an audience out there that absolutely cannot get enough of this type of game. But without any notably unique concepts behind the story or gameplay, the whole thing lives or dies by the execution, and right now the execution is messy. I do understand that this is still one person’s passion project, but if you want me to pay for your passion project then I do expect some polish, and there are many free works that are in better shape than this one, so I don’t think what I’m asking for is out of reach.
There are frequent errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar, along with malapropisms like “through” for “throw” and “waterskein” for “waterskin.” Some sentences don’t quite make sense—the PC, for example, attempts to comfort their unhappy horse by saying “I know you, we’re almost there,” which reads like the writer got distracted halfway through writing “I know you can do it” or maybe “I know you’re tired, but…”.
Combat is quite buggy, even though the only thing you can do is choose at the beginning whether you want to use your weapon or cast spells. Under some circumstances (I’m not quite sure what triggers this), after your character attacks, you’re taken to a passage with a broken “if” macro that gives you three “next round” links. Display of the enemy’s remaining hit points also doesn’t always work quite right.
The combat is also an area where I have some quibbles with the underlying game design (I think). It doesn’t seem well-balanced for different PC builds, for starters. I originally rolled up a squishy magic-user, as is my wont. But it was absolutely impossible to make it through the first battle with that build, as you have no option to try to stay out of range of the enemy and are constantly taking hits. I ended up having to restart and create a character with a high Constitution stat to see the rest of the demo. Making one choice and then clicking through a bunch more screens to find out whether you die or not also isn’t very compelling. Surely one of the key aspects of a D&D-inspired game is the ability to strategize turn by turn?
As for the romanceable party members, their character introductions are offloaded to a “relationships” screen accessible from the sidebar that I didn’t look at until halfway through the demo. I think that’s likely to be the case for many people (why look at the “relationships” screen before you’ve made a few choices that are likely to affect relationships?), so I would recommend working this information into the game proper. Also, the one time I chose a flirty option, the game said absolutely nothing about how the character being flirted with responded—the entire resulting passage was just a restatement of what my character had said, an added line or two of my character’s thoughts, and the link to the next passage. I can’t tell if that’s a writing issue or a technical one where text should have appeared and didn’t, but either way it discouraged me from trying more flirty options, since seeing the other character’s reactions is pretty much the whole point of a romance with a blank-slate PC.
I don’t think Sword of Voldiir is a fundamentally bad game—the problems it has are the problems that pretty much every IF work has when it hasn’t been through proper beta-testing (which IME in this sphere usually includes writing feedback along with bug-spotting and feedback on game balance). I think a few rounds of thorough testing and feedback from maybe 4-5 people who aren’t the author could really make this sparkle. But as it is, the game feels not ready for primetime.
