X-Blades Review (PC)
When I was first introduced to X-Blades, via a standard press release, I have to admit that I kind of glossed it over, as a generic hack and slash type game, with nothing to catch my eye, or differentiate it from everyone else in the genre. Of course, that was before I was introduced to the main character in X-Blades, a sassy young explorer who goes by the name Ayumi. It should also be noted that she goes spelunking while wearing a dental floss thong, and a couple pieces of triangle fabric over her chest area, held together by more dental floss. While not a bad thing, it ends up making the X-Blades experience a bit cheap, and feeling like more development went into generating a character, rather than a full game experience.
As stated before, X-Blades is about an explorer by the name Ayumi. Ayumi in her travels finds a map that will lead her to a treasure that will unlock ultimate fame and fortune. However, Ayumi also finds a relic along the way that binds her with a curse that starts to eat away at her very soul. The plot is somewhat thin, and does little more than link the levels that you are hacking your way through, but it services the story well enough, and as you delve further in, you do start to get more interesting story elements. By that point, you might not care anymore, as it takes a while for those story elements to show up.
X-Blades is at heart a hack and slash game, and it makes no pretenses about that fact. Every level feels loosely glued together, only so you can fight huge numbers of beasts, demons, and animals. You use two primary weapons that will help you defeat your enemies, your blades and your guns. Melee combat is controlled by the left mouse button, while the guns are used by clicking the right button. Also, you can add other special powers that will boost up your attacks that you gain by defeating enemies. Some of the extra powers you can gain include lighting your blades aflame, or creating a earthquake that destroys all nearby enemies, and even a huge fireball that can kill most enemies with one shot.
X-Blades has a very distinct look and style, that looks very cool at times, and then shows off such displays of light bloom and glimmer that it tries to wash out my entire screen in a white glow. Some of the attached screens show how much the developers decided to use lighting to give the world an almost diamond-like luster that kills off the unique anime look of the game. Ayumi, on the other hand, looks really good, and the anime look that she has, as well as the other characters that interact with her are very cool, even though the scenes are limited in number. One thing that is nice for PC players is that the game seems to detect the perfect settings for your machine, which is one of the first times I have had this happen on a PC. Every setting, including AA, Antroscopic, resolution, everything was selected for the best performance on my PC, and it seems to show when you watch the cut-scenes, Ayumi herself and most of the light bloom, even when it is way overdone.
Controls are solid and translate well to a mouse and keyboard, with everything being logically mapped in tight around the main WASD controls. You can assign your special powers that you buy to the Q, E, C, and Z keys so powers are always right there. However, the game is written to accept an Xbox 360 controller, to the point that the colored buttons show up in every menu selection. Controller support is easy to hook up and is also logically addressed to the controller format. I did have an issue when I had a non-360 controller hooked up, as my screen spun around aimlessly until I turned on the controller. It was a wireless Logitech Rumblepad, and it had to be turned on, even if I was not using the controller, otherwise it would cause havoc with the screen. I think that is more a controller issue, but you might want to be aware of that before you use a controller.
The music that plays in the menus and during battles has a nice flow, and really helps give you a feel for what is happening on the battlefield. The menu song is one of those musical numbers that has you humming it for hours after you have finished playing for the evening. The music had a quality that reminded me of early Prince of Persia games, which is a very good pedigree to have when it comes to ambiance music. Sound however seems to be lacking for you main character Ayumi, as she has a grating voice that comes off as uninspired and reminded me of a poorly dubbed voice on an afternoon cartoon block. It may have been by design, but I much preferred the moments when Ayumi was just making gestures and quirky noises during transition scenes.
Ayumi, while being a great looking and styled character, also becomes the greatest curse of X-Blades, because it seems like a ton of focus has gone into creating Ayumi, while the rest of the X-Blades seems to be cobbled together around her. It is not that X-Blades is a bad game, but when you look at all the press, video and pictures, it just looks like most of the game’s budget was spent on Ayumi, and the rest of the game, was rushed after that main premise was put into play. This becomes apparent once you look at the enemies, and the levels which tend to look a bit rough and undefined, or very similar looking in nature. A few of the enemies stand out like the Phantoms, but most seem to merge together into beasts that look similar save a palette change.
At the end of the day, X-Blades is a quandary of a title. It has tons of hack and slash action, with the ability to string together combos, lots of levels to fight your way through, and a very well animated story line with Ayumi. But at the same time, the enemies are very generic, lighting is way off the scale, and the story is so disjointed at times you lose interest in what is holding the levels together. X-Blades is a title that is worth playing, but it might be a title to hold off on until it comes down a couple of dollars to justify the purchase. X-Blades gets 3 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
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