X-Blades [PC, PS3, Xbox 360]

Posted June 7, 2009 by BBlank in PC, PC Reviews, PS3, PS3 Reviews, Reviews, Xbox 360 Reviews.

Reviewed on Xbox 360

The beat ‘em up genre was once amongst the best video games had to offer, from Final Fight to Streets Of Rage, Golden Axe and Alien Storm, even the arcades were alight with titles spawning from the X-Men and Alien and Predator universes. It seemed for a while that this genre was simply untouchable and could produce playable interesting titles one after the other. For a while anyway, because when 3D became the dominate landscape for games a lot changed.

For years now we’ve seen the beat ‘em up genre and even the hack ‘n’ slash genre struggle to survive in the realm of 3D. It seems that when a developer attempts to emulate or evolve the past success of the genre it doesn’t seem to work. The recent Golden Axe Beast Rider is a good example of this and sadly X-Blades follows suit.

In X-Blades you play as Ayumi, aka Lara Croft meets Brats, who is a treasure hunter of sorts who probably has the most miss-matched voice over actress you’ll ever hear in a video game. It’s around here that the lack of polish and care starts to become obvious. X-Blades is a B grade game all the way through, and the biggest problem with X-Blades right from the start is the lack of any kind of presentable story. This continues throughout the entire game, at not one moment do you feel like you’re performing an action that is in anyway progressing and enhancing the story forwards. Instead everything in X-Blades is a grind towards seemingly nothing.

Sure there “is” a story here, but it doesn’t seem to want to be told. Every now and then characters will divulge information in a conversation that the player isn’t part of. From the start of the game you get the feeling that maybe you’ll be filled in later, but after a while you start to realising that is never going to happen. Everything seems to have already happened before you ever got to take control of Ayumi.

No character development is ever given, names are barely ever mentioned, back stories don’t exist and my kingdom for an understandable motive. X-Blades is trying to be a 4^th generation beat’em up with a current generation spark, but developers Gaijin Entertainment only seem to take the worst parts of both. The gameplay for instance is sadly more of the same dire standard. It’s beat’em up 101, repetitive enemies that after the first few levels only change in skin colour or size, a vast amount of backtracking with only a night or day time difference to them, and a flat magic system that only complicates the tedious button mashing combat.

This gameplay sounds like something from a game such as Golden Axe, but X-Blades seems to take these elements without anything that made those games enjoyable. Enemies are recycled in beat’em ups but this is typically along with harder more interesting enemies in levels that become bigger and more complicate to create an experience that feels like it builds. X-Blades constantly feels like you’re playing the first level with a bigger head count. This may have been somewhat forgivable if X-Blades offered anything that hasn’t been done nearly two decades ago and nearly ten times better.

In-fact the only effort to offer any kind of unique gameplay to X-Blades the magic system, ends up as the game’s worst aspect. To call the magic complicated and tedious doesn’t really touch the surface of how badly implemented it is. As the game progresses enemies become immune to certain attacks, but with each death of an antagonist or environmental object they offer up a certain amount of souls. Souls are the in game currency and are used to buy upgrades and most importantly, magic abilities.

You buy and assign these abilities to buttons on the controller and can then use them in battle. Unfortunately a pause screen makes all of this ten times harder then it ever needed to be, constantly pausing in and out of battle to make sure you have the right fire magic for the right ice enemy soon becomes as much a constant part of the gameplay as actually moving Ayumi around the levels.

With this comes an inexcusable element of trial and error. There is no way to know what enemies you will be facing on any level, thus making the magic system stripped of any strategic element it could have had. In every level you find yourself entering just to find out which magic ability you need to destroy the enemy the next time you encounter them.

Unfortunately defeating an enemy is rarely as clear as “ice enemy needs fire attack”. This means you have to experiment with an overblown over priced magic system to get it right. This not only slows the game down, but reduces it to an exercise in frustration. As for the levels themselves, you’ll be placed in a small arena type area for every single one and then forced to fight off waves of enemies until the area is clear. This is sadly all X-Blades has to offer outside of a g-string wearing protagonist.

Which brings me to look of the game, although Ayumi technically looks like what people would draw Lara Croft as for a joke, she like the rest of the game is graphically more than pleasant on the eyes. The levels for the most part thanks to some impressive lighting and art direction offer a pretty backdrop to this inane madness.

The enemies are sadly unlike Ayumi and are struck down with awkward and clumsy animations which in turn ruins most of any good the game had to offer in way of graphically prowess. This is a shame as the anime style really works well but ultimately comes across as wasted. The music also suffers a similar fate with an entertaining soundtrack that could have worked a lot better on a far more worth while game. It is a shame to see such an interesting graphic engine and soundtrack become buried underneath so much atrocious elements of gameplay.

Although a good beat ‘em up is rare in the current market, if done right they do work. You only need to look at Marvel Ultimate Alliance to understand this, X-Blades either has its eyes shut or looks in a completely different direction. This is unfortunate, because for all that X-Blades does bad, it doesn’t try to be anything more then what it says on the tin.

Coming away from X-Blades you get the feeling that the people who see the artwork on the cover and buy it based on that alone will actually enjoy this game, because X-Blades isn’t meant to set the world on fire, change your life and immerse you in a story that has a profound affect on you. X-Blades is meant to be a mindless button bashing romp just like those old games people still remember so highly. The only problem is X-Blades isn’t as good as any of them.

Tagged as Ayumi, beat 'em up, Gaijin Entertainment, hack 'n slash, PC, Ubisoft, X-Blades