![]() ![]() Like in any other fighting game you end up trying to limit the space the enemy can move into, make the moves they won’t expect, and exploit the windows of opportunity they leave you, and yet all of this can be done without a whole lot of preamble to take on board all the caveats of the gameplay. It’s a more filled-out version of Iron Galaxy’s Divekick. In some ways Nidhogg is a fighting game for the people who don’t want to spend countless evenings and weekends glued to a television screen to compete at a basic level. Making headway without a sword feels daring. Even if you miss you can enjoy the advantage of moving faster without your rapier, but you have less reach on your strikes and they only knock the opponent to the floor instead of killing them. ![]() Then there’s the option to throw your sword, the game’s sole projectile attack, and it feels like magic when it hits. Some of the game’s one-two punches are a particular treat, like dive-kicking an enemy to knock them down then pulling their spine out while they’re on the floor, or knocking the sword from their hand and then stabbing them in the chest. If your opponent tries to jump at you maybe you stab high, if they try to to hit you in the middle maybe you duck and slice low. These two things combine to make clashes between you and your opponent like a tiny game of rock-paper-scissors, but with a weighting on coordination and reaction times. The game also implements something approximate to a high-mid-low system of combat, allowing you to hold your sword at different heights when you attack. This gives you a simple and easily memorable palette of moves from which you can work. Nidhogg is essentially a two-button affair, with one button letting you jump and the other letting you attack. ![]() If you’re already in control taking down the other player is also a way to secure your own safety, forcing them to spawn a little way ahead in the stage. The way to gain control? Kill your opponent. The catch is you can only continue progressing to the next screen if you have control of the game. Both of you start in the dead center of the level with player one’s goal being to try and make it all the way to the rightmost screen of the stage, while player two is attempting to make it all the way to the leftmost screen. You and your opponent assume the forms of two monochrome pixel people armed with rapiers, competing for the honour of being eaten by the mythical Nidhogg. Nidhogg’s action is set on a 2D plane with a side-on perspective and takes place across a series of screens. This is the family of games Nidhogg belongs to, with exactly the kind of frantic excitement you’d want to experience around other players, but a focus on one-on-one competition and unique combat dynamics. Fortunately, there is a new corner of indie development devoted to solving this problem with titles like Gang Beasts, Sportsfriends, and Samurai Gunn giving us a reason to get local multiplayer back into our homes. That’s not to suggest that it’s “dead” or that there aren’t people out there with a major investment in it, but it’s one of those truths of the internet age that a decreasing number of games are offering an offline multiplayer component, and that with more incentive than ever to play online fewer and fewer of us are getting that closer human contact and electric atmosphere which comes with sitting down in front of a system with some friends and going toe-to-toe at a good video game. ![]()
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