Well, it was a good try, at least.
That light of hope was quickly blown up by a ray of pure evil, anger, hatred, and nerd rage.
Bladestorm is (ANOTHER) strategy-game-in-button-mashing-clothing game, though not as much as the Warriors series. You're thrown into a tavern as a mercenary taking the best pay supporting England or France in the wonderful 100(and twenty) Years War. Throughout the course of the game, you'll be visiting such provinces and Provence, Normandy, Aquitaine, Ile-de-France, Gergovie, Brittany, and Champagne. There's a good chance I either forgot a place, or one of those provinces listed isn't even in the game. But that doesn't matter, because each province is as bland as the last one. All of the cities/fortresses look the same, save Paris of course, and the environment isn't much to look at anyway.
For instance, the city of Rennes is designed exactly the same as the city of Reims. There's a HUGE lack of variety in most every city, fort, or large city you come across. That's not what this game is about though, you stop caring about what crap looks like an hour into the game.
On to the story, it's the 100 Years War. Complete with historical phalicies, and characters that shouldn't appear in some battles, and should be dead by the time another battle comes along. I don't feel like touching up on that, because there's so much to complain about that I'd never get around to the gameplay.
Speaking of gameplay, the game plays like Kessen 3, except buttons are assigned to the specific abilities of the unit you're currently in control of. Here's how it works; you start off a battle by your lonesome. You do one of two things: find a unit to take control of, or summon a unit you bought from the shop at the tavern. There are several unit types, sword types, bow types, horse types, elephants, camels, katanas, scythes, axes, 1h and shield style, and so on. Each archetype has several different unit types, each with their own unique ability(ies) or their archetype specific ability. Some attacks range from ungodly useful, to ungodly useless. Each unit has its weakness to other units, giving each an advantage/disadvantage over another. There are a variety of different units to choose from, at least, so you don't get bored as quickly. You can also customize your units, as in upgrade their ability attacks, and overall statistics. It really makes the difference of turning a crap unit archetype into an unstoppable rending machine.
The major flaw with combat is that the majority of it is out of your control. You hold one button to make your whole unit attack, and you occasionally hit an ability button to use a special attack, which usually has a ridiculously long cooldown. It is fun, however, to watch your unit batter aside others and watch the little tiny peons go flying into a painful death. THAT will never get old. Maybe.
Let me warn you, this game's difficulty curve goes in just about every direction. Sometimes the game will be so easy that you don't even have to do work, and you can just let the NPCs take care of the battle. Other times, the game gets annoyingly difficult, and you die. A lot. This changes in the middle-ish of the game. Once you can buy Armored Knights, or Royal Knights, and your Horse Stats are high enough, you can charge through an entire army and not get hit once, and take down a good 4-5 units while you're at it. Doing so will fill up your Bladestorm meter. Bladestorm is basically Musou Attacks on steroids. Your unit becomes ungodly fast, strong, and the abilities charge up quicker, making you an even more effective killing machine.
But even after all of that, you're never really doing anything new. The missions you take are the same; capture X point, over and over again. You occasionally get story missions, or side-quests, but they're just about as tedious as every quest. You can try to conquer every base in every provence for the country you choose, but nothing ever happens. The battle just keeps on going, long after you beat the game. The characters are nothing memorable either, and you'll probably find most to be annoying. Almost all of them have atrocious voice acting(what's new there, right?), and don't have any redeeming qualities to make you give a rat's ass about the storyline.
Aside from all of that, you can customize the look of your character through buying armor from the merchant. Wooo, that makes the game that much better. Not really.
In summary, this game is so repetitive, boring, and meaningless that you're better off sticking to the Warriors series(oh god). It's nice that Koei tried, but they're not going to get away with throwing their typical mediocrity into a series that doesn't have the "Warriors" name stamped on it. This is by no means a good game, and definitely isn't a good buy, hell I'd even recommend Colosseum: Road to Freedom over this. It was nice to see a change in direction, but this change didn't even come close to 'shining' as brightly as the Warrior series.