Blade of Darkness
Blade throws every game style and the kitchen sink into its standard third-person action/adventure format, hosting RPG elements, four playable characters, a strong beat-‘em-up combat style, an involved plotline, and no small strategy melded within the subtleties of the core gameplay. At its heart, the game is a castle and dungeon crawl, intertwined with a perpetual key hunt and an occasional search for six runes, hidden in secret locations within the game world’s 18 levels. This journey across a traditional fantasy world overrun by orcs is made palatable by an eerie lighting system and some amazing injections of sound that cause the tense atmosphere to drip from the stone cold walls of each new location.
Technologically, Blade is a tour de force of graphical wizardry. The texture detail on most of the creatures and the décor in the levels are amazing in themselves, but the highpoint is the much-touted lighting system. Flickering torches cause shadows to dance off the walls and floors, and magic weapons glint off the shields of enemy knights. Even outdoor environments benefit from subtle shadowing, as archers hide on balconies, and snow flurries blow across ledges.
In building a tense atmosphere of danger in every single environment, subtle sound cues magnify the graphical impact. As you enter one cathedral area, decked with demonic iconography in its stained-glass windows, a rousing Gregorian chant drowns your nervous footfalls. It’s a dazzling setup -- though the payoff (a duel against two death knights) really didn’t live up to the level of expectation that the choral audio cue suggested. Elsewhere, the ambient sound is unobtrusive, and footsteps sound different on various surfaces, showing a keen attention to detail.
All this detail serves as a backdrop to the combat itself, which is an intriguing, carefully constructed affair of thoughtful thrusting, slashing, and parrying. Each of the four character classes -- Dwarf, Amazon, Knight and Barbarian -- has its own attack styles and weapon preferences: the Barbarian wields two-handed weapons with ease, for example, while the Dwarf is at home with axes and hammers and the defensive aid of a shield. The characters also have unique special moves, pulled off using combos akin to those in a beat-’em-up. The quirky control scheme doesn’t let you strafe at all unless you’re in a combat stance--achieved by hitting the Tab key to lock-on to an enemy, at which point you can strafe around in a dance routine of jabs, swipes, and poetic combos. Some more powerful magic weapons have their own specific combo options
All these fighting features sounds wonderfully compelling until you discover just how hard it is to pull off the super-power combos. The ability to nail the super-powered special attacks makes a huge difference, particularly in the later game, when you’re faced with enemies sporting several thousand more hit points than you. But these attacks are tough to complete and frustrating in the chaos of battle, as your combos run together and quickly sap your stamina bar. At least when you do land special moves, you’re rewarded with a colored glow of power and massively increased damage
Character weapon preferences also affect the difficulty level of playing each class. The Amazon’s aptitude with spears and bo sticks and her nimble footwork in dodging enemy attacks make her the easiest to play. The lumbering Barbarian, for his part, dishes out great damage but often has to stand toe-to-toe and take some knocks along the way. Of course, we can’t overlook the gore factor. Blade’s "M" rating is well deserved, as the brutal cleaving of limbs and heads is common, and the attendant spurts of blood stain the walls and floors (though gore and blood can be turned off). Amusingly, the enemies have a subtle, stunned reaction to this dismemberment, rocking and staggering slowly before finally keeling over in a blood-soaked heap. Adding insult to their injury, you can pick up a foe’s severed limb and beat his buddy to death with the soggy end.
Blade’s baddies display some impressive AI-driven moves and vary in their hit-point levels and equipment (they’re armed with progressively more vicious armaments that you can pick up); but fighting the orcs, knights, skeletons, zombies, and golems does get quite repetitive, despite strategic quirks of learning what weapons do better damage against particular creatures (use hammers against skeletons and edged weapons against zombies). It’s credit to the combat system, though, that each encounter still plays in a unique way. On top of that, multiple enemies will work together, with the strongest coming forward first, though nothing will inflame your ire more than a near-dead orc swigging from a full health potion it’s carrying while you’re dodging his buddies’ swipes. The anguish is tangible, mainly because you know that dying will cause a reload, and the reload times are looooong. Not only that, but there’s no quick-save: you have to maneuver through two menu screens to access the save option, and then there are only six slots available.
While the LAN and TCP/IP multiplayer duels encourage effective use of combos, and work reasonably smoothly, they don’t have the depth of possibilities that even Interplay’s quirky, poor-selling Die By The Sword managed several years ago. It’s a shame Blade doesn’t offer more in this regard considering how potentially repetitive the single-player campaign can become. Long and frequent load times serve only to pull you out of the game world, and in doing so, render much of the voice-driven plot-telling inconsequential. Similarly, the game’s RPG element serves to make you feel more powerful as you progress, but it’s an artificial system: I gained two levels in quick succession when killing just two average skeletons -- I’d evidently taken a branching path more difficult than my character could manage, and was given a rapid boost.
Though the journey through Blade’s world is very, very arduous, it’s encouraging that the designers seemed to keep the best for last, with the final levels featuring the most impressive boss enemies, and the most detailed and inventive level designs. When you complete the quest, you’ll have earned it, since it too often feels like hard work. But no job worth doing is easy, and Blade is a great example of its genre, and a fine gaming experience by any standards.