Reviews - Ensiferum

This game is a joke. It's like the developers saw that blocks were the new popular thing now, and tried to make a Call of Duty clone based off of that.
The gameplay couldn't get any more generic. It's got everything you'd expect in a game attempting to imitate CoD: iron sights, regenerating health, restrictive weapon limit. You can carry 2 guns (or 1 gun and 1 accessory item), 2 explosives (or 1 explosive and 1 medkit), a melee weapon and then 3 perk items. The world is made of destructible blocks, although blocks don't have any physics, they'll float in the air even with nothing attaching it to the ground. You can build structures, either by placing blocks one at a time or by building an entire pre-built structure at once, but you can also dig through blocks instantly at a rather fast pace and at a distant of about 10 blocks away rendering any sort of building pointless.
The UI is the worst part of it all. It covers a large portion of your screen, with your gun blocking way more of your view than it should. Going into fullscreen doesn't help as it only scales up the UI.
Graphics look like a poorly made Minecraft texture pack, there's no real overall art direction, and the character skins are ugly to look at.
The community, while not a direct fault of the developers, is also terrible. Nothing but kids cursing at each other constantly.

Not everything is terrible. There's a large number of maps to choose from, with a few of them being pretty cool, the Blocktron maps in particular. They have that Tron aesthetic of bright blue lines stretching over a black surface, which is far better than the generic Minecraft texture pack aesthetic of the other maps. I'd enjoy playing in these maps if the gameplay wasn't so dull.
Even if none of the default maps appeal to you, there's a map editor that you can make your own maps to play in. This is basically what the browser version of Minecraft was, placing and removing blocks, but there's potential to create some decent maps.

Everything about this game is fantastic. It might be a bit short on content in terms of enemies, weapons, traps and items; but that doesn't stop it from still being loads of fun and having amazing replayability.
It's a hybrid of Binding of Isaac and Doom, with the floor generation and item collecting of Isaac and fast-paced shooting of Doom, and it does it well enough that it's its own game and doesn't feel like it's trying to replace either of those two.
The art style, while simple, is well-done. It's appealing to look at despite textures being pixelated and models being blocky. The lighting is interesting as well; enemies, projectiles, and explosive barrels all stand out amongst the darkness in each room, making them easily recognizable even when you're running around the room too fast to get a good look at everything around you. It's exciting to see a thick blur of light on the ground because you know there's a large mass of coins laying there waiting to be picked up.
The electronic music is also good and fits the mood of the game very well. I enjoyed every track despite electronic not even being my preferred music genre.

Overall, this game is well deserving of a 10/10 score and for being only $6 to purchase a copy it's definitely worth buying and supporting the devs. I very much look forward to seeing what new content gets added in the future.