Blade & Sword Review

When it comes to challenging combat, Blade & Sword has a few cool moments. Certain enemies won't be so easy to manage. Using different combat formations, with remarkable resilience to your attacks, some creatures are clever and tough competitors in battle. Still, not all is honky-dory, for we encountered shortcomings in the AI which reduced the game's difficulty. What happens is that particular creatures seem unwary and even oblivious to your presence. Such faults add to the game's general disappointment.

Blade & Sword is a major let down when it comes to visuals. Hitting shift + F2 will let you cycle through resolutions, 640*480, 800*600, and 1024*768. However, seeing how this wasn't properly explained in-game, most people will end up playing the game in 800*600. Also, there aren't any additional effects on offer such as, dynamic lighting, complex shadows, or anything at all that might enliven the atmosphere. Very little effort was poured into the overall design. All through the game, we witnessed deplorable artwork, scantily detailed backdrops, and unimaginative character models. We also found the surroundings to be poor in color and short of additional elements, such as wildlife, water effects, etc. Fair enough, some weather effects were thrown in, such as storms, and rain, but that's all there is to it. There's nothing noteworthy regarding the game's audio either. An apparent lack of character voicing, coupled with substandard ambient noises, clearly shows that the developers spent even less time polishing the sounds than the visuals. Things were perked up a bit with the soundtrack, although after a while, you can easily discern the tunes recurring over and over again. What can we say; we sympathize with the team's obvious lack of decent funding, but we cannot turn a blind eye to how their game looks and sounds.

When all is said and then, we're left with this feeling that Pixel Studios had a fair shot at making a decent title, but they blew it. Discarding the obviously outdated visuals and feeble audio, we believe that certain gameplay elements should have been considerably elaborated on. Slicing and dicing is all very well, but Blade & Sword simply cries out for more depth. Occasionally enjoyable combat surely won't be enough for the game to compete against similar titles on the market.