X-Blades (Xbox 360)

Back when I played a game called Blades of Time I was somewhat worried by its odd relationship to its predecessor X-Blades. Both games star a treasure hunter named Ayumi who wields two blades, but Ayumi looks more like a realistic woman in Blades of Time while her X-Blades version has clear anime inspiration in her design and her smooth look almost makes her feel like a Barbie doll. Some people classify Blades of Time as a reboot or sequel, but while both games are hack-and-slash action games from the same company with a similarly named protagonist, I was right in my assumption I didn’t need to play one before the other. While I wasn’t too kind to Blades of Time in my coverage, playing Gaijin Entertainment’s first game starring a treasure hunter named Ayumi actually made me miss some of that game’s design as they clearly tried a lot more with the follow up than they did with X-Blades.

X-Blades, known in its home country of Russia as Oniblade, begins when Ayumi heads to an ancient ruin in search of an artifact left by an ancient and mysterious god only for that artifact to curse her when she touches it. Beginning as a headstrong and greedy woman quick to quip at any major enemy with demeaning and flippant insults, she makes sure to tell the player directly that she works alone so that later she can pretend she got close to a character you barely see during the adventure and whose relationship with her is best described as reluctant and sometimes antagonistic. There isn’t much of a story, Ayumi transported to a different ruined area that she spends most the experience exploring as she tries to find and fight a lion-like creature called The Dark to clear away her curse. The cutscenes can almost feel like they’re more interesting with how much fun the cinematic camera is having sweeping around and trying to make things look more dynamic and action-packed, sometimes even going for over the top sweeps when characters are standing still.

There are two endings to this fairly bland and sparsely told story and perhaps it is fortunate the game doesn’t do much to invest you in its characters or plot as it is incredibly easy to get locked into the bad ending as early as the second area of around forty. Ayumi is able to learn various special attacks and magic spells to help in combat against the creatures of The Dark, buying them by spending the souls she gathers from defeated enemies. When you have enough souls to buy a new ability the game puts up an on-screen message to alert you about this, and one of the cheapest spells you can buy is Darkball, a fairly quick and reliable projectile attack. If you buy this or any other spell of the darkness element, you are locked into the bad ending and will need to start a new save file to have a hope of seeing the better one. The game doesn’t warn you of the dangers of the spell or try to frame it as drawing on easily acquired power at a personal cost, it’s just sitting in the spell purchasing list innocuously as the game subtly pushes you to buy it. Perhaps this trap was meant to create some artificial replayability so you can see a different minute-long cutscene at the end, but this rude trick feels like an exceptionally poor idea because the game is already far too long for how little content it has and even reuses plenty of it already.

X-Blades is primarily about moving from room to room in the ruins you’re exploring, killing whatever dark creatures impede your progress to open the way onward. A few rooms have exits you can reach beforehand, sometimes you need to destroy monster spawners to prevent their infinite respawning, and occasionally large enemies of focus must be taken down, some even actual boss battles. A few token moments do exist where you need to cross a hallway without falling off a spinning cylinder or you need to dodge rising floor spikes in a locked room, but the bulk of the experience will be waving your swords around to kill the enemies who run up to you to get slashed apart. X-Blades idea of increasing difficulty is often just making how many enemies you need to kill to clear a room even higher and often those enemies can be handled with your basic attack combo and maybe the occasional use of a magic spell that hits the area around you so you don’t get surrounded. Many rooms even early on will drag as you are just waiting for new enemies to appear so you can mindlessly slash them to ribbons and then wait for the next ones to show up, a meter at the bottom of the screen helping make it clear you’re making some progress but it can be agonizing to see how slowly it goes down in some rooms.

There are enemies who do require a bit of strategy to take down, usually because they have some sort of damage immunity that forces you to pull on specific spells to hurt them or leave them vulnerable to your blades. Rather than having the player pick up on some aspect of the creature to learn their weakness though, encountering a new monster adds them to the journal you read on the pause screen. The monster’s entry in the journal will tell you exactly what they resist and usually give away their weaknesses as well, but since there is a small range of elemental spells, buying them isn’t cheap initially, and experimentation to suss it out naturally would be slow, this will probably be the way you have to figure out how to defeat a tougher enemy rather than having a battle that requires a bit more thought. Sometimes you might need to kill some enemies to deactivate a barrier a bigger foe is using so at least prioritizing foes or avoiding damage from the big monster while doing so can add a bit of danger and challenge to a fight, but many big creatures also either can be reached with your swords or resist them so these fights often boil down to running around, killing some small creatures, then repeatedly firing a projectile spell before repeating the process for far too long.

Your blades do have guns built into them and the game pretends that will be important for a bit, having a segment where it teaches you to use different firing methods on foes who can only be killed by that approach, but then enemies after don’t require it so they’re either going to be slashed apart, fired on quickly with normal guns to take out if you’d rather not approach for a bit, or you fire your spells at them. The gameplay hits an incredibly shallow gameplay loop early on and its disruptions are often as tedious as its regular play because everything takes too long to kill and the options for more damage are magic spells that can take a bit to finish their animation, cost energy that is restored by slashing foes, and can even end up slower overall than constant sword flurries. There are certainly periods of the game where you barely need to think as you hammer the attack button and wait for it to end, but there are at least little things hidden around rooms to grab like upgrade-focused collectibles to boost your power and nominally give you new attack options that probably won’t do much to alleviate the boredom even if you integrate them. You are given a dodge maneuver, but the means of executing is so odd it will probably only be used for the guillotine room that requires it to survive or by accident while trying to jump. Since you can have four abilities set to certain buttons and the pointless gun settings take up the directional pad, dodging requires you to press forward, and then press forward again and the A button. A is usually your jump and you can use it to pull yourself out of a pack in combat, but pressing forward twice is easy to do by accident so you dodge instead of jump while trying to dodge on purpose can be touchy since the spacing on the inputs isn’t totally clear. Maybe if dodging was a focus the game could have been more complex, but if the dodge was controlled with this input method then the need to do so would only be aggravating.

Perhaps the most egregious part of the game’s incredible monotony comes after your visit to the Dark Temple about halfway through the adventure. Once you fight the boss here, the game goes from day to evening and now you need to make your way through almost every room you had already visited before but populated with more enemies. While X-Blades is probably a 6-8 hour game, a fair chunk of that will be redoing the same content after it had failed to thrill in the first half, and while the second time around the ruins in the evening does throw in more enemies who require you to use magic spells to hurt them, you still have plenty of rooms where you need to whittle down those resilient monster spawners or fight through wave after wave of incompetent cannon fodder. In the early part of the game when you see spells available for purchase with prices in the millions you might balk at ever having that many, the early creatures providing a fairly tiny amount of souls. By the end of the game though you can earn tens of millions in a single room well past the point there’s even any new upgrades to purchase, although the game does allow you to spend souls to refill magic and health. While this feature is appreciated since in some longer rooms you can get whittled down gradually, especially if its a boss monster who has long periods of invincibility to slow things down, being able to pause and power up so easily also makes the action feel even less meaningful. Trivializing it with these eventually easily purchased boons is probably for the best though as needing to repeat a room where you slowly work through huge crowds of generic monsters simply because they landed enough small scratches would be a worse fate than having the already unexciting combat be a bit more challenging just because you couldn’t refill your health during a skirmish.

THE VERDICT: X-Blades is the kind of hack-and-slash action game that people who hate the genre assume they’re like. The majority of the combat is extremely basic hammering of the standard attack button, with the few moments of mild platforming or a boss who requires you to attack a tiny bit differently there as a token amount of variation between the mindless fighting. Even those bosses are often of a mold where you kill the basic enemies to get your shot in on the big guy with magic projectiles, and when the game decides much of its second half should just be reusing rooms from the first but in the evening, it shows it has no qualms about the repetitive and uninspired design constantly on show. One of the few bright sides in X-Blades is you barely have to think during needlessly long and samey combat, but that’s hardly a reason to pick up this creatively bankrupt action title.

And so, I give X-Blades for Xbox 360…

A TERRIBLE rating. When a game is as overtly repetitive and filled with recycled content as X-Blades, it can at least dull your senses to its problems eventually. If the game did have the obnoxiously long battles with constant waves of incoming enemies but required constant attention then it would certainly grate on the player more, but the lack of depth at least means making progress isn’t excruciating. It is still baffling the game would design tougher enemies who are often dealt with either by literally looking up how to beat them in your little guide or just firing projectiles during fleeting windows of opportunity, showing that there wasn’t much thought into the actual flow and variety of the action. Needing to whip out your guns to shoot a flying enemy is just as straightforward and unexciting as slashing apart the latest enemy since it just requires hammering the appropriate button, but again you find yourself saying at least the game doesn’t fill its overly long battles with foes who are too difficult to take down. X-Blades is a long uphill climb without much of anything to make that exciting, but the challenge here is more about just sticking with it rather than anything too difficult on the path. We’re not climbing Mt. Everest here, we’re just hiking up a rather large hill while we aren’t really dressed for the task. It’s unexciting, more effort than its worth, and the payoff is weak, but you can move on from it quickly enough and didn’t need to try too hard to get there.

If any of this sounded appealing, and some of the ideas like the magic system could have worked in a better game easily, then just get Blades of Time instead. That game has its issues as well but it does seem to understand its combat needs more ideas at play, it ropes in different gameplay types to break up the monotony, and its story at least feels less generic than the one in X-blades. X-Blades’s biggest problem is one of excess in the wrong areas and scarcity in the areas it needed more going on. The magic spells and guns could have been a more interesting part of combat but they often just feel like either the only choice or a quick way to dispense with someone even though it won’t lessen the time it takes to clear a room overall. Rooms in general should have toyed with the format more, some minor puzzle-solving or more moments of platforming a way to break up the monotony. Some true gimmicks, foes you need to truly diversify your attacks to overcome, or even just more focus on avoiding danger instead of just letting it all come to you to get slashed would help. I can see that Gaijin Entertainment learned before they made Blades of Time at least even though that game still had a way to go, but their first game with Ayumi skimps on so many elements needed to keep an action game engaging that it practically uses its mindless monotony as its marketing point. It’s not entertaining, deep, or rewarding, but at least you’ll get through it eventually.