X-Blades Review

Written by: Steve Martin Posted: 11th March 2009

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Anime hack 'n' slash.

X-Blades Details:

	Action
	PC/PlayStation 3/Xbox 360
	Gaijin Entertainment
	SouthPeak

12+

Out Now

There are a multitude of 3rd person hack’n’slash games available for the PS3 and Xbox360, some good and some not so good, unfortunately X-Blades falls into the later. This game seems to want to be Devil May Cry and many of the gameplay features are familiar. Defeated enemies give you souls which can be used to buy new techniques via a very bland text heavy menu screen, if you manage to keep your attacks going you start a combo, the bigger your combo the more souls you receive, the heroines bladed weapons act as close-quarters slashing weapons or as guns from long distance, the similarities are there in abundance, you can even transform into a Dark or Light form that is distinctly similar to DMC’s Devil Trigger modes.

Anyway, you are Ayumi, a young, female treasure hunter with an irritating attitude, after discovering a map which leads her to the location of the Dark orb, when she touches it she passes out. When she awakens she finds herself cursed and in front of some strange ruins and must battle her way through and find a way to remove the curse put upon her.

Levels are split into sections in the ruins which are inhabited by monsters and creatures which you must defeat using your blades, guns or magic spells. Combat is a relatively straightforward affair, and combos are relatively easy to keep going just by mashing the attack button repeatedly, as the enemies will generally just swarm around and try and surround you, making them easily slashable. Each level has either a set number of monsters to defeat or a number of monster generators to destroy or a boss creature to vanquish, once this criteria is met and all the remaining monsters have been killed you may progress to the next area. This gameplay gets very redundant and boring after a short time. Throughout the game there are also pieces of coins to collect which will upgrade your melee, shooting and air attacking skills, these are usually fairly easy to find as you progress through the levels but getting them all may give you the impetus to play the game a second time.

One of the most irritating factors is the constantly re-spawning bad guys, I hate this in games anyway, I feel it’s a lazy and cheap way to make a game challenging, but in X-Blades it is just plain annoying. Usually the level consists of a boss baddie to defeat or monster generators to destroy, this in itself is not really challenging but the constant wave of smaller baddies which is only there to distract you is so frustrating. Another annoyance is the fact that most monsters you encounter have only a couple of things they are weak against, the first example is a turtle-like boss creature that breathes fireballs, it is pretty much immune to everything but fire magic, the only way to find this out is to access your bestiary and read the information on this new creature, I would have preformed a prompt to tell me to use fire attacks, and this continues for the duration of the game! Anyway, this also means that if you come across a monster that has a certain weakness to an attack or type of magic, you have to acquire enough souls so that you can buy it from the skills list. Another irritation is that it takes Ayumi so long to get back up once she has been attacked and knocked to the ground, this gives the enemies plenty of time to surround you, and is frustrating. A similar problem is encountered when using magic, Ayumi has to be stood still to cast spells, which gives the enemies too much time to gang up on you. The final annoyance is the aiming system, Ayumi automatically targets the nearest enemy, you can target lock the selected enemy by holding L1, but it can difficult to highlight and aim at the enemy you actually want to attack as there are so many minions in the way and the aiming marker is rather large making it hard to tell who you are actually targeting and hence attacking, and the last thing you want to do is waste your magic on a small monster when you need as much as you can get for the boss creature. These may only sound like small problems but in the heat of a battle against a mass of monsters, they become big issues! Oh, and the controls are twitchy making Ayumi difficult to control when you only need small movements, thankfully this isn’t required often!

As mentioned beforehand you can learn new abilities and spells using the souls collected from the foes you have defeated, these range from new powerful melee attacks, new shooting modes allowing you to fire more quickly or a more widespread attack range to new magic abilities such as fireballs and giving elemental powers to your blades and bullets. Abilities usually consume rage power, which is gained by dealing damage or taking damage and this explains the need for the re-spawning monsters! The only drawback is that you only set 4 abilities or spells to the available hotkeys on the control pad, if you want to use an ability that isn’t bound to a hotkey then you have to go into the menu and select it from the abilities list. This really cuts into the action and slows things right down, I’m sure the developers could have found another way to do this.

The visuals range from average to absolutely dire, the opening cut-scene is nicely cel-shaded with an obvious anime style, and I first thought that it looked pretty good, but the in-game graphics are shocking in comparison. Ayumi is lacking in detail and the enemies are even worse, some are horribly blocky and badly animated. The camera is a pain to control as it constantly wants to be directly behind you and far too close, meaning that attacks from behind are all too frequent, adding to the irritation. The locations are bland and uninspiring, consisting mainly of ruins and only a few destroyable objects that break unrealistically. The frame rate is also susceptible to some lag when there are a number of enemies on screen and you are attempting to move the camera around.

The high tempo techno pop that loops during the fights grates from the beginning to the end of the game, the more sedate music when there are no baddies around is marginally better. The voice acting isn’t great, with Ayumi coming across very high-pitched and irritating and the other characters are a little lacklustre.

Redeeming features are few and far between, I suppose it’s not unplayable and it may provide some short-lived entertainment for hack’n’slash fans, and the fact that there are two possible endings means that there is some replayability, but I personally wouldn’t put myself through it all again.

So overall, there’s a lot of hacking and slashing and shooting in this game, maybe a little too much, but this is so poorly done that it makes the action frustratingly repetitive and much harder than it ought to be. Twitchy controls and a poor abilities usage system hinder this game further, and the constant barrage of minions is frustrating and a cheap way to increase the difficulty of the game! I recommend you save your money and buy Devil May Cry 4 or Heavenly Sword, you can probably get both of these for the price of X-Blades, and they are far superior to this in so many ways!