I normally stay far away from Flash games, especially the ones on Facebook, but Swords and Potions 2 garnered some attention on a couple of gaming forums I frequent, so I had to check this one out.
- The premise here is that you own and run an item shop in some standard fantasy RPG-land. There’s an indie Japanese-made game on Steam called Recettear that does this. I’ve never tried that one but commenters have noted that this Flash game is actually better at the item shop aspect than it.
- It’s really like a mini-tycoon game. You start with a small shop, buy furniture for it, which includes bins for basic resources like iron, wood, herbs etc. You then hire workers to use those resources to make weapons, armor, potions etc. Adventurers come throughout the day to buy stuff. If they find what they want, they become happy customers and come back more often. If you keep disappointing them, they become upset.
- The economic aspect is pretty weak in the sense you have no power over any prices. All items sold have a fixed price, with small bonuses depending on what other pieces of furniture you have. For example, having a blade rack in your shop gives a small bonus to the selling prices of all swords and daggers. Similarly, all workers you hire only have a one-time cost. There are no recurring wages to pay. And like Facebook games, you get your building materials for free. The resource bins simply recharge slowly over time.
- As you might expect, as your workers become more skilled, they learn recipes for more complicated items. What’s cool is that the adventurers who are customers need to be higher level to use them too and you do want to sell higher level items because they are worth much more money. What you do here is that you can sponsor adventurers to go on quests and even lend them equipment from your shop to improve their chances for success. You get to keep the quest rewards, though sometimes the adventurers break your loaned equipment, and they earn XP.
- There’s also a neat little town improvement aspect in that you shop is situated in a city with the shops of other people. The city has buildings, which when improved, can increase the pool of customers and the rate of resource replenishment. But improving them means that the players need to contribute resources to the public good. Unfortunately I seem to have started in an impoverished city that only got steadily more depopulated over time, so we never actually improved anything.
As usual, it’s not a game that can keep me hooked for long because it’s just too simplistic and the money-grubbing too apparent. Still, I can see why this can be an addictive grind for some people. There’s even space for some creative optimization here in deciding which customers to cultivate and which workers to specialize in maximize your income. You might even think about optimizing the layout of your shop for maximum worker efficiency or simple aesthetics. As Flash games go, this is a pretty good one but I do so wish that someone would give a premise like a fuller, more complex treatment.
3 Responses to “Swords & Potions 2”
Mmm, you should definitely give Recettear a go. If nothing else, it has a fantastic ensemble cast of characters. It also has a fluctuating market that is in part driven by what you sell to people. My favorite part is the bit where you can take an adventurer down into the dungeons to hack-and-slash enemies to loot ingredients that let you make more advanced (and ergo expensive!) items.
The game starts out a bit challenging (as every week, you have to pay an ever-escalating portion of the initial debt incurred by your father who went off adventuring), but once you beat it once, the New Game+ is substantially easier, so the game turns into “how many characters and items can I unlock!”, which I found to be a pretty addictive “collect them all” game. Still working on completing a lot of it.
It definitely sounds like a much more character-driven game than this.
Still, glad to see other takes on genres popping up. The town improvement is a fun aspect.
I heard about the active adventuring aspect of Recettear and it sounded to me like an awkward mixing of genres. If I want a shop management game, essentially a tycoon game, why would I also want a (maybe superficial?) RPG tacked on to it? I also find that the odd sensibilities of Japanese games often don’t sit well with me.
Still, it’s cheap enough that there’s no harm in trying it out one day.
Oh, yeah. That makes total sense. I also say this with the full knowledge that I have an often weird taste in games, so a genre mashup like that doesn’t seem strange to me. I think, at least for me, it works because the tycoon aspect isn’t heavily detailed, so it doesn’t overshadow the adventuring aspect. (i.e., you don’t hire workers, or manage anything beyond the physical appearance of your shop or the placement of your items for sale + buying things to sell)
The RPG aspect is actually well-done, I find. It’s more of a straight action game, and you unlock different characters, each with their own unique playstyle. Then it’s a matter of learning how enemies move, so that you can outmaneuver them and beat them.
Also–if you feel like just trying it out, the demo covers the first in-game week, which is enough time to get a rough idea of how it plays. (It was enough to sell me on it, and then when the full game came out, I found out how little of the game it actually represented.)
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