As the old saying goes, you can’t polish a turd, but once in a while, someone makes a valiant attempt at it. While many a gamer may despise the underhanded tactics and franchise milking of EA, Sword of Sodan is proof that they’ve been churning out their fair share of garbage for years. Sword of Sodan proves that adding a smattering of blood and violence to a crappy game does not make it edgy, or good for that matter.
Okay so I’ll admit it, ever since I was a kid I’ve grown up with a bloodlust. I’ve always “gotten off” on the sight of blood and gore, though I can’t really explain why. I’ve always been a huge fan of horror movies, hell, Jason Vorhees was practically my babysitter when my parents dropped my siblings and me off at the local movie theater every weekend. Needless to say, when violence and gore started seeping into video games, I was ecstatic. Finally, two of my favorite pastimes had seemingly come together in a bloody union wrapped in entrails. Unfortunately, this union didn’t occur until the 16-bit era and I found myself in a predicament of owning a SNES, which means I owned the crappy version of Mortal Kombat while my Genesis owning friends soaked in virtual bloodbaths as much as they wanted. Fortunately, I had a friend who was more than willing to swap his Genesis for my SNES over every other weekend and after our exchange was done, we’d make a beeline to the local game rental place. It was in the hallowed halls of Time Out – Game Rentals and Sports Cards that I discovered Sword of Sodan.
Released a full two years before Mortal Kombat bunched the panties of politicians everywhere, Sword of Sodan was released on the Genesis with the tag-line “Revenge is best written in blood”. The back of the box featured frame-by-frame images of giants being decapitated and blood oozing from dead soldiers’ bodies. Who would have known this was all just a gimmick to hype a heaping pile of crap.
There’s little to the story of Sword of Sodan aside from the fact that there’s a wizard in a castle and it’s up to a lone warrior to stop him. When you start the game, you get the option to choose how many lives you’ll have and two difficulty levels, which I’ll refer to as sleepy, and “uber pwnage”. You’ll also get to choose between two characters to play for the endless replay value the game holds. You can play as generic male warrior who wields a sword and walks like his legs are made of cement or generic female warrior who, oh hell, she’s exactly the same as the other guy.
The premise of the game is to guide your low-rent Conan through seven levels of stilted and awkward combat against dozens of faceless, recycled enemies all set to the heart-pumping soundtrack of happy birds chirping. During your quest, you’ll face everything from pike man clone #384 to axe man #172 while engaged in tactical combat, which consists of swinging your sword wildly at their chests, performing a high slash at their shoulders, or just straight ducking and stabbing them in their junk. The robust fighting system is bolstered by even more robust hit detection where if you’re too close to an enemy, your sword will go right through them meaning that you’ll have to back up to about the point where the tip of their spear is in your gut before you can even think about damaging them. However, the enemies are the last thing to worry about, as your worst enemy is the unresponsive controls. As if it’s bad enough that you move at the speed of molasses, it’s another thing when you have enemies taking you on from both sides and you’re constantly fighting to get your character to turn around. In the end, it all ends up looking like one big double penetration laden gang-bang. Each stage requires you to kill a certain number of cookie-cutter clones, usually in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty, in order to pass through the invisible door at the other side of the screen. Later levels introduce new generic monsters such as purple bugs that hover right over your head and drain your energy, zombies that attack you with fireballs that move ten times faster that your lumbering hulk can react to, and big bumbling giants.
The army of evil isn’t the only thing trying to stop you though, as there are traps laid out everywhere to thwart you. Level two has you shambling across a rickety bridge doing battle with clones while you take spikes to your gonads from the ground. Some are even kind enough to hide behind the banister. The real money shot lies at the end of the level where you’ll get in between two sets of spikes while you’re fighting off pike men, only to get an insta-death kill from a new set of spikes from below you – to which the game kindly reminds you to “watch out for traps”. Too little, too late, pal.
The real fun occurs in level five where you’ll fight endless waves of giants. The giants are a little tougher to deal with, and thanks to the flawless combat system and poor hit detection. Each giant requires that you slash at them wildly with your slowest attack while they club you on the head repeatedly. Five hits and two lives later, you’ll finally bring them to their knees where you need to slash repeatedly at their head for the awe-inspiring decapitation. Of course, that would be all too easy. The main issue is that while your character lumbers towards the waiting giants, you’ll fall into totally invisible pits with another friendly reminder to “watch out for pits” as your upholder of mediocrity plummets to their death. There’s no way around it as there’s nothing to signify where these pits are. Mixing this atrociousness with the limitations of the gameplay offers new and exciting levels of frustration never felt before. If you happen upon one of these pits, you’ll spawn back to the edge of it. At the same time, you’ve got two giants on the brink of the other side mindlessly clubbing at the air making it damn near impossible to jump over the pit and have at them. If you manage to defy this game breaking bug, you’ll be in for even more surprises. If you manage to get your hits in on one of the giants, the poor hit detection will come into play which will make you have to back up to finally be able to decapitate the son-of-a-bitch, only to receive the friendly “watch out for pits” reminder as you watch your character meet another unnecessary death. In the meantime, you’ll curse the time you’ve wasted playing this game when you could have been playing Sonic Spinball.
The ridiculousness of level 5 in action!
Sword of Sodan makes a vain attempt at innovation with different potions that you can pick up from dead enemies. As you collect potions, you can drink them individually or mix-and-match them for super secret effects. While it’s about impossible to distinguish what a Solarium or Eternium potion can do for you, it all turns into guesswork in the end. Sometimes you’ll drink a potion to heal yourself only to get a message that the potion has “no effect”. If you mix one potion with another, you can get free lives or a spell that will take one enemy down, though that’s really no help when he’s got twelve of his buddies behind him taking stabs at you. If you continue to experiment, you’ll get poisoned and lose significant portion of your life bar in return.
After level five, the game reaches insane levels of impossibility with insta-death waiting around every corner. If you’re sadistic enough to get to defeat the wizard, congratulations, enjoy your thirty-second ending that looks just as crappy as the rest of the game.
While the game attempts to reel you in with large characters a la Altered Beast, you’ll come to find that the larger sprites are, the uglier they get. The same goes for when these sprites attempt to move, I can guarantee you’ve seen thirty year-old Claymation shows that move better than this. The same can be said for the environments, since there is no parallax scrolling to be seen, it looks like your character is doing battle against a painted tarp draped up in the background. The one thing this game got right is that there are a couple of gallons of blood to be spilled, but it ends up looking as good as a two-dollar hooker in that crappy Tinkerbell make-up for kids.
Sound is virtually non-existent. Aside from the music at the title screen, there’s little soundtrack to be heard. What you’ll get instead are birds chirping whether you’re going through a field on a sunny afternoon or walking through a gritty town at night. The in-game voices are laughable where the pike men all give out similar grunts then they’re stabbed in the junk and the axe men all sound soprano. The most laughable has to be the sounds that come from the female warrior when she’s hit.
Despite being marketed as an edgy and violent title, Sword of Sodan didn’t do well despite its release on a 16-bit platform that was in the midst of a head start on Nintendo. Thankfully, a lot of people didn’t get to experience the unadulterated pain this game brought, though EA went on to become the juggernaut it is today. It wouldn’t be surprising to see them attempt to bring this franchise back from the dead. While this can be considered one of the worst games the Genesis had to offer, an Amiga version was also released that looks better in every way to this shoddy pile of garbage. However, that just might be Gamescrap for another time…
Watch levels 1-3 in action.
And for those of you who are curious, here's the best part of the game. All four seconds of it.
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As the old saying goes, you can’t polish a turd, but once in a while, someone makes a valiant attempt at it. While many a gamer may despise the underhanded tactics and franchise milking of EA, Sword of Sodan is proof that they’ve been churning out their fair share of garbage for years. Sword of Sodan proves that adding a smattering of blood and violence to a crappy game does not make it edgy, or good for that matter. 
rental place. It was in the hallowed halls of Time Out – Game Rentals and Sports Cards that I discovered Sword of Sodan. 
The army of evil isn’t the only thing trying to stop you though, as there are traps laid out everywhere to thwart you. Level two has you shambling across a rickety bridge doing battle with clones while you take spikes to your gonads from the ground. Some are even kind enough to 
