Reaper - Tale of a Pale Swordsman is an adorable (but not childish) mix of an RPG and a beat-em-up game. You play as THE Reaper and, to some degree, you have the freedom to choose whether you want to be a "good" guy or an a-hole.
What more could you wish for, right?

Be warned, though.
While both the design artist and the dialogue writer did a great job (I can't stress enough just how great the art and the dialogues were!), the developer screwed up pretty bad. Or just didn't have the money to hire a playtester or the time to playtest it themselves. Either way, it shows a lot.
At its later stages, the game becomes very enjoyable, but all this joy is burried under a heap of disasterous design choices.
If you can somehow overcome the myriad of major annoyances, though, the experience is somewhat rewarding ;)






For those who don't mind doing things the non-frustrating way: Yes, there is a working Cheat Engine table for this game that lets you (among other things) alter your gold drop, so you can purchase the absolutely necessary skill upgrades and actually enjoy the game.

Before I start this review I'd like to say that I do like the work that Hexage does and have immensely enjoyed some of their mobile apps. I must say however that "Reaper: Tale of a Pale Swordsman" looks nice, but plays terribly on PC. Reaper feels like a mobile app and just hasn't been adapted enough for PC to make it an enjoyable experience. I had some trouble navigating through game menus using the Xbox controller support and tended to resort to using my laptop's touch screen for certain commands - I'm not sure what I would have done without that option.

The problem with Reaper is that it's not just the menus that are mobile oriented; the gameplay through and through feels like a mobile game. The worst offender being that you permanently have auto-attack switched on because you don't have the range of inputs available to you on a mobile device that you have on a PC. This ends up making the fights feel somewhat tedious because you just move about getting your guy to automatically hit enemies while waiting to build up enough "rage skulls" so you can perform special moves where you actually get to press some buttons. The end result is a sloppy feeling combat system where the only attacks you get to time precisely are the special moves, and because these special moves are fueled by the boring auto-attacks interesting combo moves are pretty much non-existent.

On top of the non-PC-oriented gameplay, the level design is pretty bland. You move to different locations on a map and enter small two-dimensional battle arenas which might have some pitfalls obstacles or spiky traps to fall onto or into, and despite there being some nice art it's all pretty samey.

The story for Reaper has an intriguing concept of the protagonist being a sword for hire working for both imperial colonists who burn something called "Fluidium" for their war machines and also working for the native tribes who harness the power of the magic which is released as a byproduct of burning Fluidium. That's about as interesting as it gets because after that you just wander from camp to camp doing anything for money without ever feeling that you should care about the stories of the different groups except to tell them that you should get more money from them.

I wanted to finish this game to see if the story took an interesting direction, but the combat became so mind-numbingly tedious I just had to mark this game as a closed file in my Steam library. I'm sure this game would be one of the better selections available on the mobile market, but it just doesn't cut it for PC.

3/10 would not reap.

It's what you'd expect from a mobile port and then some - The controls are a bit clunky, but you get used to them over time. The plot isn't really there, the fighting is, at times, impossible (Screamer jumps are uninterupttable).

But the gameplay itself is so easy to pick up that I just find myself just... enjoying the experience. The ranking system gives a sense of progress, as do the constant quests.

I'd imagine that if a full-sized dev team were to take Reaper and flesh it into a full game, it would be amazing.

8/10, Slicing through everything in sight is awesome

Guilty of being an impulsive buyer, this is one of the few games I've bought on a whim that has surprised me greatly. Fun and fast enough and mildly complex enough to keep me intrigued. It's cheap, buy it already!

Reaper Tale Of A Pale Swordsman was a game made for mobiles. Once again, it shows. The art is beautiful, but the game runs at 30FPS and has that certain 'slow-mo' feeling sometimes. But it's not intentional, let me say that.

I've played it for a couple of hours now and all you're doing is walk from one point to another, while completing quests and defeating enemies. Quests consist of fetch quests and kill quests. Fetch quests have you run to several places on the map to collect stuff. But it's just clicking on the map. Your character doesn't have to do anything here. The kill quests, of course, let you kill enemies. These enemies range from simple to moderately hard. You'll be using your skills (quests grant you XP and allow you to level up resulting in several skills you can unlock) and the combat system to complete these. The skills usually let you have more health, or do more damage so there's not much variety here, but the combat system is a bit unique.

Walk towards an enemy and you'll be auto-attacking it. Auto-attacking gives you skulls and the more skulls you collect the more damage you can dish out if you decide to manually attack. I wouldn't say it's a deep system, but you have to use a bit of strategy to defeat some of the tougher enemies or if there are a lot of enemies spawning. Unfortunately, it's the only positive thing I have to say about this game.

Because it's clearly made for phones and the gameplay is just too shallow to be enjoyed on the PC I just can't recommend this game. Skip.

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Lets start with what I didn't like with the game.
1. Controls:
-The Map interaction really shows that this was made for a touchdevice to begin with, it's a thing to get used to but annoying when you are new to the game.
- Combat is a just watching the game play itself as you will auto attack instantly and consistently as soon as an enemy is comes close. You have your Manual attacks that is an Uppercut or a Slam (downward) attack but they are weak unless you wait long enough for your auto-attack to build up enough rage (skulls on the top) to make them stronger. This is fine for a touchgame when you have a limited amount of "buttons" to use to not disturbe you visual of the screen for the gameplay but a huge flaw when you have an actual controller to play with. For me this was a really fun draining aspect of the control.

Otherwise the movement is very solid and responsive and you can get a really good flow (wich is needed with combat mechanics mentioned above.

Graphics, sound were all good though.
Story I can't say much about since I didn't get very far in to the game due to the offputting controls.

If I had the choice again then I would rather have picked this up on an IOS device rather than getting it here for PC.
All the positive feedbacks in this review area fooled me though.
Maybe I will give this another chance later but not right now.

Wether or not this will be helpful to you I can't say. Just be sure to know what you are paying for, the controls are a major thing to consider if seeking a fun little game to play. This is just way to casual for my taste to be played on a PC with a controller.

Although the art is well-made and the game-play is at least tolerable, the pace of the game is glacially slow and it sticks around much longer than is fun.

For 100%-ers, this is a painful grind to finishing as the game is so slow and the requirements take many hours of repetitive combat.

The story is at least competently written, despite ending with very little fanfare.

Okay, so...

This game was alright. For what it is - a hack and slash with little in the way of strategy or tactics - it's fairly decent. You play as Reaper, the 'Dark One', acting as a sellsword between the colonizing Imperials and the native Wilderlings. You basically play all sides against each other for coin, and the only meaningful contribution you can make is how much money you receive at the end of the mission.

The story is mildly interesting but too broken up. The tribes are not each fleshed out enough, and the Imperials really just seem like colossal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ no matter what they do. There's a very downer plot twist near the end that just makes no sense at all, and the ending itself is unsatisfying. The controls are clunky and unintuitive, and it's just... ugh.

All in all, for what it is - a port of a mobile game to PC - it's decent, I guess. But if you want to buy it, wait for it to go on sale for like 70% off or something before you do. Don't buy it at full price and waste your money.

There are a lot of things to like about this game. The RPG mechanics are wonderful - equips feel unique and useful, and the customization on level-up is very well done. Character design is cute, and the art style overall is quality. It seems to me that this game would have high replay value.

However, actual gameplay, the most important part of the game, feels clunky and unresponsive. The autoattack mechanic is inspired, but not executed well. I found myself using unempowered manual attacks for the most part. The worst part of the combat, for me, was that it rarely felt like it was my fault for getting hit. This is hugely important - when you take damage, it should be because you did something wrong (except special circumstances like trading hits), and you should be able to learn from your mistake and avoid it in the future. When I got hit, it rarely felt deserved. Melee attacks from enemies have wonky hitboxes, most notably, and avoiding them feels more like a battle with the game's design than with the game itself. Dashing feels extremely clunky. The input (double tap a direction) provides too long a window, and I found myself dashing accidentally when I was only trying to adjust my position precisely. This led to frequent dashes off ledges (falling deals 50 damage, half of your base life) and just as often straight into projectile attacks, as dashing does not provide any invulnerability frames. This was really frustrating to deal with, and the rest of the gameplay just couldn't make up for this and other shortcomings.

I really wanted to like this game, and there were definitely many well-done aspects, but it failed to provide an enjoyable experience overall due to just a few small, consistent problems.