Nidhogg 2

Developer/publisher Messhof Format PC, PS4 (tested) Release out now

PC, PS4

Trust us, it looks much better in motion. Nidhogg 2’ s garish, grotesque visuals sit in jarring contrast to the first game’s minimalism, and that, you suspect, is precisely the point: there is no danger of you mistaking this sequel for its progenitor. The clean pixel work of the original is gone, replaced with a more detailed, but likely far more divisive, homage to the 16bit era. The extra level of detail is used to highlight, sometimes unnecessarily so, the slapstick humour this unconventional fighting game has always had in spades: melee kills are now carried out with a gleeful grimace on the victor’s face, while the Benny Hill-style sprints away from a pursuer are now even funnier with those fat little legs moving like the clappers. Few would say it looks better than its austere predecessor – unless they’d always pined for a chaotic, bloody fighting game played out between two naked Homer Simpsons – but

Nidhogg 2’ s new look quickly grows on you, and only rarely detracts from the experience, when a sudden jumble of combatants, weapons and scenery combine to make the action tricky to parse.

Yet that is more often deliberate than it is an accident. Waist-high grass makes crouching opponents impossible to track; hollowed-out tree trunks provide full-body cover. Foreground scenery might briefly obscure a body part or weapon swing, and at one stage you’re looking through a body of water at two warring silhouettes. Level design has also been designed to interrupt your rhythm. Ice floes rise and fall in the water to mess with your angles; conveyor belts screw with your positioning; and there are a far greater number of high or low routes that allow the clever player to avoid engagement altogether.

All of the above are smart, logical ways of building upon the classic Nidhogg formula. As ever, battles begin with two players in the centre of the level, which is split into multiple screens; the object is to reach the far end (player one running all the way to the right; player two to the left) to claim the ultimate victory – being gobbled up whole by the titular serpent king. Forward momentum belongs to the player with the most recent kill: only then can you push the action over to the next screen. It remains a delicious, tightly wound blade-dance, of momentum that shifts in a split second, of battles that might be over in seconds or run for half an hour. If the first game was a mixture of canny psychology and quick reactions, the sequel adds a layer of complexity through level design before you’ve even swung a sword in anger.

When you do eventually pick up a blade, anger may result, since it’s in its weapon design that Nidhogg 2 departs most dramatically from its template. Things start out well enough: Arcade mode begins much as the first ended, with both players wielding a rapier. Held in one of three stances – high, middle or low, selectable with the D-pad – it’s the classic Nidhogg face-off, both reactive (matching your opponent’s stance to parry attacks) and proactive (dancing in and out of range, hiding stance switches in jump and roll animations). Yet this is just an appetiser, designed to reacquaint you with Nidhogg’s core components while adjusting to the new level and visual design. Soon, everything changes.

There’s a dagger, fast but stumpy, often better thrown than swung, since its slender form can easily be lost amid the busy scenery. There’s a broadsword, which only has high and low stances, and alternates between them automatically between swings – if the blow doesn’t kill, it’ll likely disarm. And then there’s the bow, which ruptures Nidhogg at its core. In the first game, distance was only ever temporary: unless you took the risk of throwing your weapon, the real action only started once players were within a blade’s reach of each other. Now you can score a kill from a full screen away. There is nuance, however. Arrows can be deflected by a sword in the correct stance; firing has a slow startup animation and long recovery time, and since the pudgy new pugilists have much larger hitboxes than the original game’s stickmen, arrows that are returned to sender are tricky to avoid. You can store arrows, however, by holding the button down, increasing the startup time when you decide to shoot – and doing so in mid-air gives you a lot of control over your angle of approach.

A bow-on-bow match is tense and hilarious, like Nidhogg at its best. All the new weapons work well in isolation, or even in twos. A match fought with broadswords and bows, for example, with players alternating between them after each death, is a smart riff on the taut, minimalist strategy of the original. But when all four are thrown into the mix, things rather fall apart. The first Nidhogg worked so well because both players always had the same set of tools, unless one had thrown their weapon or had it knocked away. Now, you’re never entirely sure what your opponent is going to respawn with, and it’s all too easy to be caught out by an errant arrow or dagger, or be killed the second you spawn because you don’t know which weapon you’re holding until it’s too late. A UI prompt showing what each player can expect next would do wonders.

This weapon roulette is Nidhogg 2’ s main mode – online matches use it as default, which is somewhat less of a problem than you’d think given that, once again, servers are all but empty and the handful of ranked matches we’ve had have been as good as unplayable. Played as intended, however, in local multiplayer, Nidhogg 2 sings. That it only truly does so after you’ve delved into the options to turn various weapons on or off says much about the game: it’s a cautionary tale for the videogame sequel, a reminder that bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better, and that less sometimes really is more.

Nidhogg 2’s new look quickly grows on you, and only rarely detracts from the experience