Bleach: Shattered Blade Review

Written by: Darren Cartledge Posted: 2nd June 2008

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Don't worry its not a household cleaning product but an anime beat'em up for the Wii.

Bleach: Shattered Blade Details:

	Beat 'em Up
	Nintendo Wii
	Sega
	Sega

12+

Out Now

N/A

Turning kids anime TV shows into beat‘em ups seems to be popular amongst Wii games developers. So it’s no wonder Sega have squeezed one of the latest shows to hit our screens into the beat’em up genre.

Bleach: Shattered Blade is a pretty fast paced and intense fighting game, and unlike many other similar titles instead of the characters using their fists they have massive swords that allow you pull off powerful attacks, especially when combined with the games Bankai power up system.

Bleach features the game modes that are typical in the beat’em up genre. A Story mode that can be played as a number of different characters with the story being told from a unique perspective for each one. An arcade mode, in which you must battle through eight rounds in order to win. Versus, practice and training mode are all also present.

Battles themselves are relatively simple and the game is very easy to get to grips with. You have three different attacks at your disposal, normal, special and critical each are performed by swinging the Wii remote as a sword although to perform critical or special moves you will also have to hold down the A or B buttons respectively.

If you and your opponent strike each other at exactly the same time the game implements a cancelling out system and neither character inflicts any damage, however if you strike each other at the same time when performing critical attacks the game enters a face off between the characters and here you have to time movements of the Wii remote to a meter in order to gain the upper hand.

Movement and blocking in Bleach: Shattered Blade are controlled through the use of the nunchuck and overall the games control system works well but I don’t think it suits the fast paced nature of the game as you spend most of you time just frantically shaking the Wii remote to defeat enemies.

As mentioned above Bleach features a power-up system called Bankai, your Bankai meter is charged up by shaking the nunchuck and once its starts to flame you can enter Bankai mode allowing you to perform powerful and devastating attacks on your opponent.

On the whole Bleach doesn’t really offer much of a challenge and once you’ve mastered all the different moves, which is very simple to do you should be able to progress through the game with relative ease. There’s little replay value on offer from the game as the ease of it make it become boring to play and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to play through the story mode more then once.

Visually the game looks good, characters are nicely detailed and the game does feature some nice effects when pulling off special moves. Environments can be a little bland, although you won’t really notice as the games runs at a pretty impressive rate which goes some way to immerse you in the action.

Sound in the game is exactly what you would expect from an arcade beat’em up with fast paced music helping set an intense atmosphere and exaggerated thumps when characters land blows on each other. The game also features the voices of the actors featured in the TV show giving the game a more authentic feel which is always nice.

Bleach: Shattered Blade isn’t really going to appeal to mainstream beat’em up fans due to its simplicity and lack of replay value, fans of the anime show may want to take a look but in all honestly the game doesn’t make the same impact as the characters extremely oversized weapons.