X-Blades

The Short

Pros
- Game isn't completely broken
- Auto-maps to an Xbox 360 controller on the PC, which is nice
- Game is playable, if mashing X over and over can be counted as "playing"
- I got it essentially for free in an indie bundle somehow
- The background/world graphics are actually somewhat inspired at times
- Eventually it ends


Cons
- Graphically dated, even on max specs on PC
- Main character's design is an absolute joke
- Gameplay is extremely repetitive and dull
- Upgrades are lifeless and tedious
- No real dodge/block button
- Enemies don't react at all when you deal damage / no hit feedback
- Bosses take far too long to take down
- Some reviewers actually gave it decent scores, which tricked people into wasting their money

Meet Ayumi. Truly a woman for the modern age. 

The Long

If you are going into game design, you should pick up X-Blades. Nobody else in the entire world should even give this game a second glance, but if you are someone who likes to study games (particularly the third-person action genre variety, such as Bayonetta or God of War), then you really must play X-Blades. Not because the game is good, heavens no! But because X-Blade is the literal embodiment of everything that can be done wrong in the genre. I'm dead serious here.

I'm extremely temped to forego an actual review (or my regular formula at least) and just list down every example of how X-Blades flubs it each and every step of the way, but hopefully I'll make it to the end without getting too sidetracked. 

But seriously...are you seeing this outfit? Someone green-lighted this? Not only that, they touted it as a feature on both the box and development videos? Sorry...already getting off track here.

This game looks like ass. In both a figurative and a *cough* literal sense. 

X-Blades is the "story" of Ayumi, treasure hunter lady. I put "story" in quotes because I skipped most of it after hearing the first line to come out of her mouth. Essentially she's looking for treasure, slices up enemies, yada yada. Every instance where she spoke made me want to smash my head into a door over and over again until I went busting through like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, so we'll just leave it as "unimportant" and "bad."

Aw man, I'm already just wanting to list off all the mistakes this game makes. Screw it, we're doing that instead. Not like anybody wants to read reviews of bad games that try to mask their opinions, anyway.

In this shot, she has 67,700 souls. Why the huge space instead of a comma? I dunno, ask the bad UI designers?

So I'm a massive fan of this genre, as in massive. I've played truckloads of action games over the years, with the 3D fighting types being an absolute favorite. Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, God of War; the works. As you play through these games you start to notice some reoccurring trends, common errors if you would. Usually most games iron these out by later installments, or they only do one or two so it's forgivable.

X-Blades does all of them. Really. 

So let's just make a list here, shall we? Here's hoping I can actually remember them all, because I sure am not going back to play the game again just to remember.

Luckily, I have a lot of screenshots. 

- Infinitely Spawning Enemies - 

aka "The 'Matt Hazard' Issue"

There's nothing more frustrating then to feel like you aren't making progress in an action game. Usually you can gauge your progress as you progress forward and murder everything in your path, watching the numbers dwindle. In games where they make every kill a chore, you want to feel satisfied when you clear out a room. You don't want to feel like you are swimming against the tide.

X-Blades does this, and in spades. Nearly every level has an enemy whose sole job is to spawn truckloads more enemies. Sometimes there's a dozen of these guys, just popping out flying ghosts like there's no tomorrow! Some can't be killed until all the enemies are killed! Every boss in the game will spawn an infinite number of enemies until taken down. It's tedium at its finest!

While perhaps every once in a while its forgivable, doing it nearly every level is unbelievable. How lazy do you have to be? "Hey, just throw a few spawners in and we'll call it a level. Done!" This is Bad Design 101, and we are just getting started.

Lightning...go?

- Bosses with way too much life - 

aka "The 'No More Heroes' Issue"

This seems to be a Japanese game thing, but it happens in western games too. You get to a boss, and it seems like you are doing no damage to him at all. So what should be a challenging, engaging five minute battle ends up being ten minutes of frustrating tedium. Like the final bosses of Conan or Viking. The best part is, in most of these situations they won't even have the courtesy to grant you a checkpoint. So if you die, you go all the way back to the beginning, thirty minutes back. It's frustrating, obnoxious, and an amateur mistake. X-Blades does it not just with the bosses, but with every freaking enemy...you know what? Let's give it it's own bold thingy here.

- EVERYTHING has way too much life (including you) - 

aka "The 'Ninja Gaiden 1' Issue"

Everything takes forever to kill. Everything. Even when using the elemental weaknesses against them, it still takes too long. Even after upgrading your weapons (which I swear does nothing), most everything takes about twice as long as it should to go down. To add insult to injury, they hardly do any damage to your massive health bar, either, so it becomes an incredibly dull war of attrition. It's worse on the bosses, but having the regular enemies do it is just...it's bad. 

Hope you brought popcorn. I'm not stopping. 

- Gating your path until you kill every last enemy -

- The "'Way too many action games do this' issue"

Man I hate this, and it's always so contrived. "An invisible door appears! You can't continue until you kill every enemy in the area!"

I can understand how this can work, and honestly it's kind of a staple of the genre. Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, and God of War all do it frequently and I love those games. What makes X-Blades so much worse is the previously mentioned year and a half it takes to kill anything, and the fact that if even one tiny, hidden enemy remains (because some of them don't even seek you out; they just sort of hide) you are gated from continuing. What an awful mess. Not only that, after you clear the path, it doesn't even give you a camera pan to show where to go. You just run around hoping to find the exit eventually. Great. 

- Putting bad platforming in an action game -

- The "'Seriously, stop tacking this crap on if your system isn't designed for it' issue"

Another common issue, but it's way worse in X-Blades, mostly because the double jump only works when it wants to. I'm not kidding; I never found a way to reliably do it. Everybody loooooovvvesss having to do platforming in games that up until that point have been about action, right? That's why climbing the Hades spires in God of War is the best thing ever? Oh wait, no, it was the worst part in an otherwise highly decent game. Because nobody wants to endure bad jumping mixed with bad camera with gameplay controls clearly designed for combat in mind. 

X-Blades, with its awful jumping, takes this to a whole new level. Not only are the parts short and completely frustrating and unnecessary, but the only way to do any sort of sprint is to double tap the analog stick forward and press jump. Seriously, have you tried double tapping an analog stick in a 3D game with any reliability? It just doesn't work. And, in this game's case, resultes in a lot of cheap deaths.

I really despise this game. 

- No hit feedback. At all. -

The "'Nobody makes this mistake anymore' issue"

This is a big one. A real big one. I'd even say that, even with all the other issues before (and forthcoming) I'm listing, this one hurts me the most. There is no feedback in this game, none. Sure some of the smaller enemies sort of think about flinching when you hit them, but big enemies and bosses? They don't even react. Unless you use magic specific to knocking people over (like Earthquake), you can flail about like a crazy person and not know if your hits are even registering. Despite sometimes popping off bits of blood (or gore or...something. I honestly don't know what it is), enemies never flinch, change attack patterns, or recognize you've hit them. And considering how bad the clipping is in this game (it's bad. I can walk through most bosses without taking damage or issue whatsoever), you might never know. Considering how slow boss health meters drop (as mentioned before) you could fail about for a good chunk of time before realizing you are doing no damage. Considering some enemies have actual immunity to specific weapons like...I dunno, regular slashing, knowing that you were doing no damage would be a nice thing.

Added bonus is even your hit animation is weirdly unexaggerated. Don't worry: they make sure you can't do anything for a good several seconds before it resolves, but it looks more like she's just standing there rather than attacking. That's not frustrating at all in the middle of a big fight, to suddenly stop moving and not know why. 

I'm never gonna stop. 

- Not designing levels that flow together or work with your basic gameplay mechanics -

The "Wait, what game am I making here?" issue

X-Blades is split into a large number of very small chapters that have no mid-chapter checkpoints. 90% of these consist of a single area screen where enemies will spawn forever for a good chunk of time until you kill every single one of them and the exit to the next spot appears. Then you go into another single room "level," fight everything, and proceed. Some of these require jumping, and the game scores you after every single room.

The problem is that, with the controls, nothing seems to be designed around how the fighting is set up. You only have a basic attack and a ranged attack, and then a handful of powerups. Enemies seem to be made completely at random and the stages do not encourage any exploration or sense of wonder. One stage (I kid you not about this) was me standing in a room while spikes appeared on the floor and I dodged them by walking around the room slowly. After completing an entire set of spike patterns the pattern reset. I began to wonder if there was something else I was supposed to do, as it had been around ten minutes of me walking around a tiny room dodging spikes that did no damage. Turns out, nope! About halfway through the second cycle a cutscene triggered and I moved on. What was the freaking point of that?

- A combat system that only uses a single button -

The "Enslaved" Issue

As if this game hasn't sold you on tedium yet, what if I told you there's only one attack button? No light and heavy, no variety, one melee attack. Yeah, you have a gun attack, but considering how many enemies are melee you'll mostly just be pressing X over and over.

There are a few magic abilities in the game, which you can map to all the rest of the buttons, but most require either "Rage" or are completely useless. So you'll pretty much be pressing X. Over and over. Forever. 

Demon eyes!

- Having useless powerups that are either too cheap, too expensive, or impossible to find -

The "Devil May Cry" Issue

Upgrades in this game are a complete joke. First off there are the ones you can buy, your magic. The magic itself is a buy once, get it forever deal. It never really upgrades (though buying one kind unlocks more, though it never tells you this even remotely. Would a tree kill you?). 

The prices for these upgrades make no sense. Some are 150 souls. Some are 30,000. Both popping up shortly after starting the game. Which is better? Which does more damage? What's the difference between Fire and Lightning Blades, besides 15,000 souls? What do these moves do? Are there more combos or anything I can do with them? X-Blades tells nothing. 

But in order to actually upgrade damage you have to find secret items in the environment, which are usually hidden within inanimate objects like pots or statues. Huge surprise coming: statues take something like 10-20 hits to destroy. Seriously. And sometimes pots don't break because (as mentioned) the clipping and collision detection in this game is awful. So you'll probably miss a bunch of upgrades along the way.

Not that any matter, since there's perhaps three spells you should get (Fire Swords...uh...and Fire Swords) that are useful. The rest are absolute garbage, especially the ranged "Magic" you learn at the beginning. It does nothing. 

A bad game walks into a bar and asks, "Why do I exist?" And the bartender trades it in an Gamestop. 

- Having Auto-targeting that doesn't work -

The "Games that don't have manuel targeting" issue

This one is especially worse since a good portion of this game is ranged attack, and she can only hit something if she's targeting it.

There is no manual targeting in this game. At all. Everything is done automatically. And I say "is done" very loosely here, because the game seems to randomly choose who to target based on it's current daily horoscope mixed with whatever it read in its tea leaves this morning. I have no idea the reasoning behind the targeting here. I've tried to manually figure it out by messing with the camera, but the only thing it does consistently is avoid targeting bosses for useless enemies or just nothing in the environment. Guess it has that down, at least.

- Being so misogynistic that even males cringe at your character design.-

The "Japan" Issue

I think I should start this off with a picture, which probably isn't safe for work. Not that any of these screenshots have been.

Nothin wrong here. 

Let's go over Ayumi's clothes (or lack thereof). She wears a skimpy bikini top with a g-string on bottom, thigh armor sort of covering part of her butt but not really. Now let me point out that this is a 3D action game, so you spend most of the time behind the character. And also mention that in game her thong is low enough to see the top of her ass-crack as her butt jiggles about.

What the hell is wrong with these people? 

Add in a hefty dose of boob-bounce and the fact she looks like a well-endowed twelve-year-old and the creep factor has hit amazing new levels. I remember reading interviews with the developers of this game who were absolutely obsessed with this character design. They plastered it across everything, bring it up in every interview and touting it as the best part of their game. Like...seriously?

I'm not one to open the can of worms regarding women in games because it's far too complex with both sides taking way too many pot shots. But I think we can all agree that this character design offends everybody, clean sweep. I was embarrassed the minute I loaded this game up.

 Just...dammit X-Blades!

I could keep going, but I think you've had enough.  

Added on top of this system is graphics and character models that look like they were made in the PS2 times. Some developers use cell shading to make absolutely beautiful games (Eternal Sonata, Wind Waker) while others use it to cover lazy graphics. X-Blades is among the latter. While I will admit some of the environments do look decent, usually they are coated in such a think layer of bloom and light that you can't see anything that's going on. This is funny, because the actual effects in battle and bland, don't really emit any light (just a sort of uniform light blob; no actual shadow effects here), and it all looks outright dull. Monster designs are hideous, have low poly count, and again look like something off the PS1. 

Music is also tedious. Going a Devil May Cry route with awful butt-rock mixed with songs that I swear were written for the sole purpose of being annoying, the background music was frustrating to say the least. But what is even more annoying is the voice acting, with every character spouting awful lines in what has to be the most obnoxious voices ever. 

So much for keeping this all short. 

As stated at the beginning, X-Blades is a great game to look at from a design perspective, especially in this day and age. It falls into every single trap action games have been trying to avoid over the past decade. Despite all this, the game is still technically playable, though I have no idea why you'd ever want to. Unless you have it for a means of study, absolutely avoid.

What makes me sadder is that some gaming outlets gave this thing reasonable scores (probably because it wasn't completely broken), which undoubtably tricked some people into buying it (or playing it, in my sad case). It even got a sequel! This is not a good game, not by any stretch of the imagination. If you are looking for an action game, look anywhere elsewhere.

NOT recommended. One out of five stars. 

Evil whats-her-face compels you.