Blades of Time (PS3)
In my coverage of Nightshade, I mentioned how hack and slash games often get around their straightforward and repetitive combat with gameplay shifts or gimmicks. Blades of Time certainly realized this and made sure it’s gameplay wouldn’t just be a bunch of sword swinging action, but in chasing different ideas on how to add complexity to its combat and more mechanics to its world, this 3D action game feels like it can’t commit to any one idea of how to break away from the monotony of the regular fights.
The basics of the combat are relatively sound and even have a few decent systems built into them before you get into the gimmickry. The basic slashes combo together about as well as they should, the player mostly relying on quick strikes for decent damage. A kick attack will launch weaker enemies into the air for free aerial combos without having to worry about them having the chance to hit back, but aerial strikes aren’t very diverse either. Keeping yourself safe by running around or jumping to dodge is a fairly straightforward element of all fights as well, and most foes will have the option to press R1 for a finisher pop up once you’ve weakened them enough. Over the course of your adventure though, you get some new abilities that can be used in a fight after you’ve hit a foe enough times. Coming across altars lets you purchase new powers with the chi you collect from defeating enemies or destroying environmental objects, but for some reason you are not told how much chi you have or how much abilities cost so it can feel like the two aren’t even related and in some cases they don’t even appear to be.
The new abilities you get are often magical attacks such as a fire blast, ice blast, or the Heavy Strike which seems to be a blast of physical force. Upgrades allow these to ignite, freeze, and otherwise impact enemies, and future upgrades can allow for diversified magic use to stack damaging effects or incapacitate your enemies. These would mostly be overkill on anything but bosses since you could wipe out regular foes easily enough without such complex magic matching that takes time to build up to, but the simple button inputs to pull off these spells and extra abilities like an earthquake slam at least allow you to do something during a normal fight beyond swift slashes and the same aerial combos. They don’t quite give battles a huge bump up in depth, but they at least don’t have the faults of the other ideas tossed into the combat system.
As the game’s title implies, time manipulation is a key part of the game even though it is almost entirely irrelevant to the plot. Once you unlock the ability to rewind time, you can begin to make time clones of your self, this factoring into fights and puzzles in equal measure. The puzzles are perhaps the ones more negatively impacted because there is almost never a clever use for the mechanic. Almost every implementation of your time reversing powers involves you standing in place for a while on a button, rewinding time, and then running to perform some task while the time clone sits on the button. Since you can have multiple time clones, that task you run to can sometimes be standing on a separate button and rewinding again to continue a chain of dull interactions with a bland puzzle concept. When it comes to problem solving, the only real stand out moment that integrates the time mechanic is an enemy who is functionally invincible and you need to lure him to a spot, rewind time, and then get past while he focuses on your time clone. Time clones do serve the combat better than the puzzles though, and not really because the game is any more creative with how they weave them in. Some foes have energy shields that can only be broken if you gang up with a group of time clones and some heal if you don’t deal enough damage with the help of your past selves, so perhaps the most unique use case is a sandworm that disappears so quickly after attacking that you need to rewind and reverse its attempted ambush.
Rewinding time in a fight when it’s not outright required is often almost as straightforward as attacking them normally, the time rewind recharging quickly enough that you can slash a foe a couple times, reverse time so the clone is there helping you, and add another plain combo to the mix. Repeating this until the enemy is dead is a viable tactic a bit too often, and usually the enemies who get around it are either ones who use projectiles or foes who come in groups. Foes who are big, slow, or isolated can often fall victim to the time loop combo without any real danger to the heroine Ayumi, and she can even handle crowds with it well enough by having a time clone draw fire as you work on the foes your duplicate isn’t up against. The game seems to recognize the time rewinding could undermine some battles as some boss fights just strip it away without explanation, but they aren’t often made any better by its removal. It can be said the time powers worsen some fights though, one climactic fight with a major foe near the end of the game pretty easy to defeat with no danger at all as long as you and your time clones keep using one of the game’s other shallow gimmicks: your gun.
Ayumi can whip out a gun and turn things into a third person shooter for a bit in most any situation. Starting with a rifle but able to get things like a machine gun by finding treasure in levels, she has no ammo limitations and only needs to reload when a clip is emptied. Seemingly the gun was meant for handling others enemies with long range attacks, something to break up the melee combat as you need to shoot down foes you can’t reach because they’re flying or on high up perches. However, it integrates into the regular combat fairly well, and as that late game boss shows, it can pair dangerously well with the time rewind without the player even having to be clever in how they use it. Enemy numbers can make standing in place and firing on them a bit difficult, but it can harm encounters that were meant to be more, although even boss fights where it isn’t a cheap solution can feel a bit basic already. You can earn healing packs by dealing consistent damage in a fight, and while this isn’t so generous that you can be completely careless, even the battles where time powers won’t help and the boss is too aggressive for you to pick them off with your gun, you might be able to just brute force them and heal as necessary.
The story of Blades of Time tells the tale of a treasure hunter named Ayumi teleporting to a place called the Dragonland in searching of treasure, but the jungles, snowy mountains, and ancient ruins are all filled with hostile humans, giant monsters, and angry guardians that all play into a skirmish between the forces of Order and Chaos. While this is a fine enough explanation for why you fight who you fight, sometimes you need to create a forcefield of Order energy around you to reveal invisible monsters or activate certain switches, and this feature is used with so little flair it doesn’t really justify its existence. The desert section where you have to stay in shadows to avoid almost roasting to death immediately feels more memorable and impactful, although this is partly because the shadows aren’t always reliable cover and invisible walls can keep you from what looked like safe cover in this brief section of the game. Ayumi is unfortunately a rather unlikable protagonist who likes to talk a lot. Early on she keeps complaining to herself or reiterating how she only cares about the treasure, and this technically doesn’t really change even though she gains a dragon lady as a spiritual companion and realizes she shouldn’t be outright evil in her pursuits. She does murder a camp full of humans simply because you have no other way to progress other than to defy the friendly group’s request not to try and exit by a back gate, and she never really repents for it either. Had it just been the generic plot to find treasure turning into helping in a war against Chaos it wouldn’t be exceptional or anything, but having us follow a character who is mostly just a pretty face with a rotten attitude makes it even harder to care about the direction the plot heads.
Outside of the main adventure, Blades of Time introduces its most unexpected gimmick. Outbreak mode is a mode that can be played in single-player, co-op, or competitive multiplayer, and rather than being a mindless arena mode like many hack and slash games have, it’s actually based more on the multiplayer online battle arena genre. Players get to pick a hero to try and siege an opposing force’s base, a lane existing between the two side that is populated with towers that fires on anyone who tries to pass them by. Each base sends out AI controlled allies to push forth and try to take down towers, but they’ll fight each other and often fail at their task unless you assist with your powerful character. Carrying over the hack and slash action and adding in new abilities unique to this mode, you can compete in a battle style that can involve some strategy, integrates level up systems, and has a good set of random and planned factors to try and prevent snowballing once one side has achieved some success. It’s not as robust as the genre it’s aping, and it carries over some issues like its desert arena featuring the shadow and heat mechanic, but it does avoid things like the main game’s sometimes glitchy platforming where Ayumi can jump and plummet abruptly before she gets a chance to perform her second jump while also adding in more intelligent direction for the action you engage in. It’s an underfed mode when it comes to options, but it can certainly have its moments thanks to some intriguing reworks to Blades of Time’s hack and slash design.
THE VERDICT: If boiled down to its basics, Blades of Time would be a decent albeit unexceptional hack and slash game where magic skills can mix up the straightforward fighting, but the game piles on gimmick after gimmick and doesn’t really adjust the game design properly to accommodate them. The ability to rewind time and make copies of yourself undermines battles, especially when used in tandem with the gun, and even when they try to feature the time control ability outside of combat situations it ends up feeling tedious because of the unimaginative way it is integrated into the puzzles. Most ideas added to the action are half-baked, with even the interesting MOBA-inspired multiplayer mode not reaching its potential because it’s just another aspect of the game that doesn’t have its kinks ironed out properly. Surprisingly, the basic battling ends up being better than most attempts to break away from it, the repetitive sword fighting seeming less dull because it keeps poor company.
And so, I give Blades of Time for PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. If all Blades of Time had was the sword combat augmented by the magic abilities, it probably would still be bad because some break away from combat with fairly similar foes is definitely a direction the game should pursue. However, its attempts to do so keep coming up short, either because of programming quirks like the platforming’s glitches, conceptual problems like how easily time clones can undermine certain foes, or simply not having the substance needed to thrive like Outbreak mode. Its puzzles lack any ideas that could really make them worth engaging with, so while it’s sometimes harmless to engage with these bland side activities, Blades of Time actually feels at its best when its not being very ambitious at all. Hacking away at a crowd of bad guys isn’t a deep or complex experience, but it doesn’t grow old as quickly as sitting on buttons nor does it flounder with poorly programmed jumping physics, and while some boss battles are hurt by your special time rewinding power, at least there are plenty of smaller skirmishes you can’t breeze through by constantly turning back the clock.
Blades of Time didn’t want to finish mapping out implementation of a feature before moving onto another one, and just like someone flitting between projects rather than focusing on them one at a time, they all come out worse than if they had received a proper level of focus. Sometimes they find success and at other points they drag the game down as something unintended or poorly conceived crops up, and with a straightforward hack and slash serving as the heart of the experience, there isn’t anything to really fall back on when things start to lose their luster. Because much of the adventure and Outbreak mode don’t dip too deep into the more flawed gimmicks of the game it doesn’t become outright miserable to play, but Blades of Time struggles to provide a good reason for a player to continue playing, especially as new additions continue to squander whatever opportunity they might have had due to their shallow implementation.