Swag and Sorcery
Welcome to Swag and Sorcery, a new streamlined RPG from the creators of Punch Club and Graveyard Keeper! Build your own fantasy village, train and equip your heroes and send them out to collect Swag! Gameplay Equip your heroes Send them out to fights (up to 3 parties at a time), and closely monitor the swag they get by progressing through levels Pull them out of combat if they're about to die (otherwise they lose their loot) Upgrade the heroes in your village and Repeat Story Embark on an epic quest to retrieve the king's missing… suit. He really loves it. Wants it back. Let's put all the heroes into mortal danger for this important mission! At its core Swag and Sorcery is an epic, ruthless adventure that both RPG and idle game fans will appreciate. There's also a sarcastic cat.
Steam User 17
It's like they had good meat as a base but the potatoes simply didn't exist. It had potential it just felt intentionally cut short or something... I have weird feelings about it because it was fun but there was not much to do and certain mechanics become underused or useless later on. Sad. Maybe if they make a second one it will be a fully fleshed out experience.
Steam User 9
20 hours of numbers must get bigger clicker fun wrapped in a $2 purchase. Fun game with little to no replayability or end game content. Still worth the buy , when on sale.
Steam User 7
bundle worthy
best for TV/coffee breaks, so grind is less noticeable, not AFK friendly
unfortunately, tier III items are never needed
Steam User 9
although it's got only 54% positive reviews for me it's a good and enjoyable game. Just make sure it's your type of game. Also don't buy it full price, you can almost always find it 75-80% off
Steam User 4
My Thoughts
I'm really enjoying this game! When I first found it, I was on the fence in terms of optimism. I've seen silly-looking games end up being kind of annoying and not as funny as the writers thought it would be. This one, I actually do think the gimmick landed.
While the cutscenes can be a bit slow-paced (a 2x speed option might be nice, in case you don't want to skip them entirely), the writing is genuinely silly and clever more often than not. There have been many times where a joke's punchline finally hit where I just put my face in my hands and sighed (in a good way). This game really did something interesting and new and I applaud the creators for daring to think outside the box
What's in This Game?
When it comes to the content of the game, I noticed the store page has "clicker" as one of the tags. This is patently false. While this game has a pretty heavy idle element, idles and clickers are not the same thing. There is no rapid clicking (or even moderate clicking) required. It's more of what I would consider an idle RPG.
Your job is to help save your town by recovering the lost, magical outfit owned by the king's father (or grandfather?). To do this, you have to fight a bunch of adversaries created by the villain who shan't be named. This is done by going on short adventures - a sidescrolling single-wave trek through 1 of 7 areas that unlock as you level up. Each trek is about a minute long and involves automated gathering of resources and fighting of enemies.
There is a bit of an active element in the form of spells which you can use to assist your heroes. However, this is generally only useful in small bursts, like if you need to fight a boss and your heroes are struggling. Most of the time, it's better to just grind out areas they're strong enough to do without player spellcasting and then just leveling them up until the next area is manageable for them.
Outside of this idle adventuring segment, the rest of the game functions very much as an idle RPG. You use resources to craft goods, sell them for money, upgrade your heroes' armor, upgrade buildings, unlock new spells and buffs, and so on.
The unique element of this is the Swag portion of it. Unlike a standard fantasy RPG, this game also has a fashion gimmick. Each piece of armor or weaponry has a material, color, and fashion rating. There are frequent fashion shows that you need to dress your characters up for and participate in. The judges can be bribed with gold and the top three contestants win resources and money as prizes. Each win also gains your town more reputation in the world of fashion, which is important.
Bugs and Problems
All in all, I haven't run into many issues. The few issues I've run into have had easy fixes or can be finagled to not be an issue anymore.
When closing the game and then opening it the next day, the 4th outfit slot for each character had been wiped (except for the one who I had left *in* her 4th outfit slot). This was a pain, since these slots had their swag outfits in them for easy switching at competition time. I'm still not sure why this happened.
At one point, some items I no longer wanted weren't showing up in the marketplace for me to sell. I kept playing and just tried to ignore this. When I closed and reopened the game, they reappeared and I was able to sell them
While on treks, I've had some trouble with my heroes not using available potions when they need to. They'll be down to 20/200hp while fighting a creature that hits in the 50-80 range and, instead of using their turn to use a potion, they attack instead, ending up getting killed because of it. I've noticed that stocking potions in their individual potion slots rather than relying on the caravan potion slot has made this much more of a non-issue
It's not quite a problem, but worth mentioning as a negative, since many people dislike this: it can be quite grindy. You'll have to grind out the adventures to gather resources to make armor to sell to make money, rinse, repeat. This wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue if there was an automatic continue option. However, after each individual mission, you have to manually select the rest and heal buttons and then tell them to do the run again. Personally, I think it would be an excellent end-game research reward to be able to automate the runs, at least a certain number of times. I can see not wanting to break the game by making it possible for people to leave it running for hours by itself, but, allowing players to set it to run through a trek ~10 times without needing to manually restart it would be a huge bonus imo
Conclusion
All in all, I find this to be an extremely charming game. If you like having something fairly idle to work on while watching TV or scrolling social media on your phone, it's a great side-game, as you can use that shared time to do the grindy parts of the game and then focus more on the improvement and expansion of your teams when you've got a lot of resources saved up and want to actually give the game your full attention. If you like RPGs, idles, or anything in that vein, this is definitely worth giving a play
Steam User 2
I won't lie, this thing is short and any depth with gear customization and stat optimization is kind of pointless. It's not bad for a weekend-long purchase
Steam User 2
It's a fun short-ish management game where you both manage character builds/stats for your automatic RPG-like dungeons and focus on your deepest fashion sense all of us clearly have!
In my opinion it's completely worth the full price as it is a genuinely enjoyable and laid back management game, but I would say that the game does have some hiccups and could use some Quality of Life updates.
That said, it is a great first game and I hope to hear a second game will one day swag up my Steam library which focuses on keeping a similar intend and is able to add some of the community feedback to make it a better (and hopefully longer) experience!