3DS Critic Reviews

Sadame is a game for a very particular audience. It's not perfect, but the players the game is aimed to will love it, and we think they should take the rare opportunity of having a game like this released in Western territories.

A fun action RPG with an infernal/feudal Japanese aesthetic and some great ideas, Sadame is a welcome eShop surprise. The core combat can get repetitive, and it lacks the fluid finesse of the best beat-'em-ups, but there's a lot here to love, including a particularly thoughtful implementation of its four-character hook. If you're in the mood for a hack-and-slash alt-history lesson, Sadame can definitely cut it.

Sadame isn’t a terrible game by any stretch. Obvious attention was paid to get all the action/RPG trappings in place to create a deep experience. Everywhere, that is, except where it really counts.

SADAME has some cool ideas, but it doesn't know how to execute them properly.

Sadame is a cute nostalgic trip on the memory lane that inadvertently reminded us how much better those 16-bit games were.

The real reason to play Sadame is for the combat. That juicy, explosive combat. Don’t bother picking up this game unless you just want to hit some folk for a few hours because long before the end of the game’s weak plot you will have grown bored of slogging through demons. And if you’re after other things, then there are certainly better games.

Sadame is an interesting and well-built action game with RPG elements that offers a long and very replayable experience to those willing to dwell deep into it. It's not the most self-explanatory work in this regard, though, as many details will be lost on a Western audience and often the player is left with little explanation of the game's mechanics.

Its SNES-like art style is greatly appealing, but the core gameplay loop is far too shallow to really recommend it as an alternative to other recent 3DS offerings.

As a budget release on the 3DS eShop, and if approached as something to play in short bursts, Sadame is worth a purchase after you’ve already exhausted the best this handheld has to offer. By no means a bad game, Sadame is a 2D hack-and-slash ultimately carried by its cross-character interaction, with the often dull combat holding it back from anything more than mediocrity.

If you get a big kick of out having pages of stats to micro-manage, or finding a lot of loot, then you may gleam some enjoyment out of of playing Sadame, but for me, I appreciate its art and its classes, and that’s unfortunately all I can commend.