Shieldwall Review (PS5) – Great Wall of Awful

If Caesar himself had been as flimsy and turgid as Shieldwall, there would have never been a need for dear old Brutus to launch a plot. Nope, instead, Caesar would have likely slipped on a beautiful Roman banana in the market and impaled himself on a tree, or something. Shieldwall is one of those little games where I can see the idea behind it, but the delivery is up to the same standard as having your package launched over your roof by an Evri driver.

Is there some redemption to this self-stylised “funny” third-person action game with strategy elements? Draw your shield alongside me and form a line, we are about to be relentlessly battered not by arrows, but by poor game design.

Shield Your Eyes

As mentioned, Shieldwall is a third-person action game, where your spritely looking Caesar can attack, block, run and give out a handful of basic commands. Only, it’s “funny”… I guess because the soldiers all look like Casper at a Mario and Luigi cosplay? There are no jokes owing to the fact there’s basically no dialogue, no written text and no cutscenes. It’s a smattering of 3D stick people whacking each other with no proper hit detection and simplistic ragdoll physics.

I was so instantly unimpressed that Shieldwall might as well have locked me up in the stocks and thrown gone-off veg instead of subjecting me to this. The strategy elements fall into the category of buy a bunch of units up to the pitifully small cap, run absent-mindedly about a map until you come across a flag, stand there, do that again five times. It’s glorified domination but with tedious waiting for your gold to trickle up so unbearably slowly it’d make a snail impatient. You can assign basic commands of Hold, Follow Me, Charge, Tease and some other one, but it’s a glorified button press.

There’s no real strategy whatsoever. On the contrary, most of the missions actively require you to sit on your thumb at the start while you run about trying to collect neutral/open flags to speed up your gold collection while your troops sit and do nothing to protect your initial base. Did I mention that the best “strategy” is just to kite one enemy faction into another while waiting for said money to build? Yep, that’s the winning tactic right there. Sun Tzu ain’t got nothing on these arts of war.

Wall Me Off

Shieldwall, to its (minimal) credit, does have a pretty robust campaign. Which is good, as it’s the only mode outside of single battle skirmishes. Some levels have semi-unique setups, like the enemy starting with more flags and getting reinforcements every two minutes. As you can imagine with the gnat-sized unit limit the player has, that’s just wonderful. Occasionally there’ll be a wrinkle or two of something interesting, but it’s so painfully spread as thin as a sheet of tracing paper they might as well not be there.

The AI straight-up cheats in comparison to the player, which is nothing new in games like this, normally it’s to keep things relatively evenly matched. Here, however, it amounts to tedious, boring and inane slogs of attrition where the AI will just continually pump out armies, meaning you can never use actual strategy to overcome them. Instead, you again just kite the army somewhere else and then walk around collecting the empty flags they’ve vacated. Rinse, repeat until the torture is over.

Some missions even have timer counts of up to 45 minutes. I don’t need to tell you that this is far more than it should be, do I? I can’t shake the feeling that so much of the core design is just there to drag out every battle without any remorse. Sure, there are upgrades, but they’re the same every mission, as are the three unit types you can purchase, so there’s no sense of progression or upward scaling. All around, Shieldwall is riddled with holes, much like the defence of King Harold at Hastings (which led to his eye getting rather forcefully poked out with an arrow, by the way).

Shield Meets Wall, Everyone Loses

It’s pretty plain to see that I didn’t enjoy any of my time with Shieldwall. From minute one to when I rage quit it for wasting an hour of my time on a terribly designed level, all I wanted to do was play other games instead. There may some masochists out there who like these kinds of janky, basic and uninspired titles, but I’m sadly not one of them. I can appreciate the concept and some of the ideas, but I honestly quite despised the experience itself.

At the very least, it’s mostly functional. I had one instance of a glitch where I fell through the map and ended up right inside the enemy castle. I also had one crash but honestly, I’m not even holding that against the game, it gave me a reason to take a break from it, mercifully. The unit designs are at least colourful, but everything from the terrain to the textural work and everything in between is pretty dour to look at too.

I totally understand that this is a cheaper game. It’s a small budget title and I’m no stranger to tiny productions creating flawed experiences. Shieldwall, however, feels like an egregious example of a game that wanted to waste my time more than anything else, and that I can’t really stand. If this is what Caesar is reduced to, perhaps the 23 stab wounds were a better fate than this.

Shieldwall is available now on PlayStation 4/5 (review platform), PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch.

Developer: Nezon Productions
Publisher: Nezon Productions

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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