Did we design the menu clear enough? Have we made the first level easy enough? Perhaps to easy for seasoned players? Whenever we launch a new game, we feel anxious about… basically everything. As you can see in the image to the right, the consensus is that the game is a solid 8, which is great!

Still, the things that you remember most from reviews are the critical notes. Some of them keep hanging for over a decade (Gamepro review of Toki Tori Game Boy Color complained about the ‘cooky cutter garbage graphics’, which still hurts :)). So let’s see what our critics are critical about.

Multiplayer may come to the iOS version at one point, but it’s too early to be specific about it. Aside from that, this is also a pretty good point. The game features multiplayer on a single iPad, which people really seem to like, but on iPhone there is not enough screen real-estate to make this work. But having the ‘single player’ menu option remain on iPhone raises the wrong expectations.

This snippet comes from the lowest rated review we’ve got on Metacritic which is a 3 out of 5 stars. It sadly highlights the low price expectations iPhone and iPad players have these days. We could start a rant about the many thousands of man-hours that were put into this game, but if there is anything to learn from this, it’s that we just need to accept and adapt.

We usually say that you have one minute to grab the attention of your customer on iPhone. This proves to be a real challenge for a more complex game such as Swords & Soldiers. You don’t want to overwhelm players with too much info, and you know that a lot of good stuff is still coming down the line. Perhaps someone reading this can share their experiences?

They’ve got us there. This indeed was a missed opportunity.

Feel free to give us some more critique below in the comments section. We’ll keep an eye out and respond, scout’s honor!