X-Blades PC Review

If you read the X-Blades Preview I wrote a while back then you probably know what the game is all about. For those of you who haven’t got the chance to read it, lend an ear to what I have to say

X-Blades is a hack-and-slash adventure game, featuring Ayumi, a beautiful girl wearing a thong. As I said in the preview, Gaijin surely knows that 95% of the gamers are males and they didn’t had to think too much before bringing Ayumi “to life”. Our heroine is in search for a very powerful artifact which supposedly will look very good in her private treasure collection. Unfortunately, she catches a curse when she touches the orb ( girls these days, they never listen) and the artifact guardian summons a spell that teleports Ayumi to another realm. From here on, the whole plot flies around finding a cure for her dark curse. Ayumi is not alone in this quest for “cleansing her body and soul”, she’s being helped by “forgot-his-name” (meaning he’s not that important anyhow) Jay, a boy possessing light magic skills.

This is how it begins:

Our heroine is bringing to fight some of her friends, a gun and two sword, which will pierce the enemy lines like a knife through butter. Most of the times, the enemy will come in hordes, but you can put them down fairly easy. There are different types of enemies that require special skills to be defeated. While the ground troops can be knocked down with the “Earthquake” skill, the air units will only be harmed if you shoot them. Some are only vulnerable to fire attacks, some to light and so on. Each time you meet a new type of enemy, the “Bestiary” will update giving a short description about it and its vulnerabilities.

X-Blades will put your skills to the test, with several boss fights, that can be defeated more or less easily. Some will have minions that will need to be killed or frozen before you can do any damage to them while some just need you to get a good timing to attack.

Killing mobs will give experience points with which you can buy new skills, upgrade your melee or shooting skill (you can shoot faster or your bullets to reflect), replenish life or rage. Rage is also replenished when you attack while life will auto fill when you’re out of combat. If that’s not enough, green crystals found on the battlefield will replenish your hitpoints, while red crystals replenish rage.

The game features a basic interface, with a health and rage bar on the top left of the screen, your currently experience points and the 4 active skills. Even though, you will learn over 15 spells, only 4 of them can be active at the same time. Depending on what type of monsters you will fight, you need to select 4 spells you want to use in a fight. Of course, you can change these spells any time you want, even in the heat of the battle. As you move with W,A,S,D; Gaijin picked the keys Q,E,C,Z to bind these 4 spells, and I must say it’s a good choice of keys. That leaves “Space key” for jumping, left mouse click for melee attacks and right mouse click for your pistol.

The whole action is incredibly fast, and sometime you won’t even hit your target with melee attacks, a poor targeting mode adding to the frustration. Coming to help the action are the graphics which are very good and even if I put all the graphic options on highest and it still moves very smooth reaching more than 30 fps. The game can be played on normal difficulty by casual gamers and it can still be quite easy, but if you want a more challenging approach I suggest going for hard mode.

Diary: “I had some few fights with some nasty creatures here, but nothing really worth mentioning…”

X-Blades present itself very nice with a hentai porn star on the cover to attract the gamers, but despite the quick action, nice graphics, a really cool soundtrack and a half naked girl, the game lacks in story, character personality and varied levels. Almost every level repeats itself after a while; the only difference is that you’re playing at evening. This is probably the reason I finished only about 80% of the game, I was getting tired seeing the same landscapes again and again.

… More about X-Blades

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