Up until about a week ago I had heard nothing about this game. It’s had a fairly low profile amongst the gaming community and only received notice of late due to the female protagonists attire (or lack of ). I decided to give it a go anyway, I’m a fan of brawlers in general, and this looked like a game in the same brackets as Devil May Cry, a series which I do like. Being that it was fairly low profile and from a little known developer I kept my expectations low.

Story: 8/10

Surprisingly, the story of X-Blades is not that bad (well it doesn’t match how bad the games title is or how clichéd the main characters outfit is). You play as Ayumi, a blonde, 20 something, treasure hunter who finds a map to a mysterious artefact hidden in some ancient ruins. However, her journey there brings her face to face with a power that will force her to choose between the light and dark side. Due to this, rather arbitrary, choice (of which you will know nothing about your first time through the game) the ending of the game will change. Without fail, unless you’ve read up about this game before hand, you will get the bad ending. The voice acting is not the best but overall the cut scenes where sparing and where a welcome reprieve from the relentless sword wielding action. The story was simple and a little hackneyed but never the less it gave purpose to the game. Plus, Ayumi is a likeable character, more so than the likes of Lara Croft. Hopefully this game will get a sequel to develop her back story more.

Design: 7/10

The game has a few design flaws. Mainly for me was the menu system which felt akin to the one used in Resident Evil 4. You have to pause the game to go into your menu to buy new abilities, upgrade them and also to heal yourself and fill up your magic bar. It breaks up the flow of the game in my opinion. They have the directions of the D-Pad assigned to your 4 pistol fire modes (of which you’ll probably only use one while playing the game). I felt only 1 of the directions of the D-Pad could of been used for switching between fire mods and the other 3 used for switching between your main powers and healing yourself. This would of avoided the need to pause the game every time you need to switch powers (which happens more often the further into the game you get). An example would be the new Resident Evil 5 demo, where they have completed removed the need to pause the game to handle your inventory.

Other than this though the game has a lot of plus points. The fighting is fluid and the camera movement rarely annoys. Technically, it ran fine on my HTPC (8800GT, 4GB RAM, 2.4Ghz C2D), no slowdown, glitches, tearing or sound issues. From such a small developer it’s a breath of fresh air to get a PC port of a game that trumps a lot of the games out for PC made by much larger game devs (spiderman: web of shadows, i’m looking at you) that suffer from a lot bugs and glitches.

Gameplay: 6/10

This game feels like half a game in terms of gameplay. The fight system is solid, so are the powers, upgrades, camera movement and flow in the fights… but that alone makes up pretty much the whole game. There are some light platforming areas every now and again, but they don’t amount to much more than jumping to a higher platform and then down again. Unlike previous, more well known brawlers, there is really no change in the gameplay from start to finish. You enter a room, the exits lock and you have to defeat a set number of baddies before the next room unlocks. Rinse and repeat this for the whole game. What changes is how you approach each fight, which is what adds to the variety and saves the game from becoming quickly repetitive. Different baddies are weakened by different types of attacks and powers that you have to remember to progress. As the game progresses, the order in which you attack becomes important also so that you can only do damage to the main opponent once some other criteria has been met (i.e. such as freezing some guards or extinguishing some flames that are used to protect your opponent) Overall it would of been nice to have some more variety of gameplay, but what it has has been executed pretty well.

Presentation: 8/10

With loads of bloom and lens flare, this game does feel very next gen. A lot of the arenas you enter are showered in light streaming through stained glass windows or soaked in golden sunlight with thick vegetation and ancient ruins. there has been a lot of attention to detail put into the world, it’s just a pity you can’t interact with it more. The cut scenes, however, are an oddity as they are actually presented worse than the actual graphics in the game, which is a first in my opinion as the opposite is nearly always true. It looks like they where trying to go for a very, cell-shaded, anime feel in the cut scenes but it has just ended up making the polygon corners very apparent and led to some odd character animations.

Conclusion:

Overall I felt the game is worth at least a rent if you are in anyway a fan of the likes of Devil May Cry or other such brawlers. The combo system is decent enough and the graphics, while they won’t make your eyes bleed, are pretty none the less. Also the lead female is running around in nothing much more than a bathing suit with gun swords Come on you knew I had to mention it eventually. Get this game for all the reasons I mentioned above, and not because you hope to see some skin coloured polygons because the novelty will quickly wear off.

Score: 7.25/10

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