Swordy trailer reveals a "physics brawler" featuring gigantic, unwieldy blades

You call your game Swordy and you have my attention, my interest, and Gimli's axe, the heroic dwarf not quite understanding that it's primarily a game about enormous swords. As shown at PAX, Swordy is a top-down local multiplayer thing where you hit your friends in the face until they explode in a shower of chunky pixels. The only caveat is that you have to do that in the game , rather in real life, or else the police get involved and it's this whole big thing. Developers Frogshark released a trailer a little while ago showing the game in action; you can find the sworded video below.

Were I a lazy sot—checks in mirror: I am!—I'd describe Swordy as a top-down take on Nidhogg, with a similarly abstract (but less trippy) art style and with added exploding firebrands, impressive water effects, and "fluid and weighty physics based combat" according to Frogshark. As some giant words in the above trailer reveal, you can slam, bash, throw, slice, punch, block and stab your way to victory in the competitive four-player game, or indeed slam, bash, throw, slice, punch, block and stab your way to defeat. I'm a big fan of the battle music, which I hope makes its way into the game.

Swordy doesn't yet have a release date, but it does have lots of giant swords.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.