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Title: X-Blades X-Blades has been excellently summed up in one sentence by BigRagoo; "...main character may look hot, but thats not worth a game IMO." Average gamers are attracted to:
Take a look at this list and you would come to the right conclusion if you thought to yourself, "Gamers today seem to have a lot in common with our chimpanzee brethren. In addition to smearing shame on our school systems, less developmentally challenged gamers feel the burn of mediocre titles taking up shelf space and developer focii. There is a battle waged between developers that place creativity and innovation higher than dumbing down a product for more massive appeal and developers quite content to appeal to the uninsightful. In the spirit of minimalism let me sum up the two opposing sides: Integrity VS. Money Late 1996 marks the point when the light bulb turned on inside of the caverness spaces producers call their skulls. Suddenly 3D graphics made it possible to add depth to square breasts (Lara Croft and Tifa) and elongate an already stale battle system, called turn-based, with sparkly effects. Let me be fair and say that there are developers under the thorny whip of direction that, honestly, try their hardest to make the movie/comic/tv show licensed game they were given 3 weeks to code stink a little less than it has to. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is a good example and I suggest you try it out. However, there even exist developers with their own projects that cram as much sensory appeal into their product leaving no room for a soul of any kind. It makes sense if the developer is new to the field and is in need of quick cash. It's like temporarily compromising your morals by giving some stranger a blow job behind the market then going inside and purchasing a six-pack then selling it to the middle school kids outside. You promise to never do it again and you might not, but the allure of quick cash is indeed tempting. Russian developer, Gaijin Entertainment, is in this position after releasing X-Blades. They can either take the money from X-Blades and use it as capital to fund a truly inspired work, thus earning the respect of other developers or release another dull and dumb game and sleep on piles of cash next to beautiful people. As an aside, I wonder which would give you the worst diseases; sleeping on cash or rubbing up against prostitutes? Getting to this point in the review you have probably come to the understanding that I do not like X-Blades. I have said twice that it lacks a soul. Now, I don't mean that in a religious context because I would sooner scoop out my eyes with a spoon then buy into any one of the millions of asinine supranatural ideas that have flowed from the minds of naive, greedy, and psychologically unstable humans. No, what I mean is that if you look passed X-Blades' beautiful presentation there is nothing left. I love Streets of Rage, I have it on my PSP and sometimes play before bed. I asked myself, minus nostalgia, why do I like Streets of Rage so much, but find fault in X-Blades? I believe it comes down to what the developers had in mind when they started making the game. When a development team sits down and says, "We're going to make the best beat-em-up," they have a good chance of doing just that. The focus there is to analyze what made the best beat-em-up in the past and see how they can improve on that formula. When the X-Blades development team sat down I imagine their goal was not to make the best beat-em-up, but to make and promote a game with the most visual appeal. Here is another example: I once read that the developers of Street Fighter 2 liked the game so much they'd stay up nights during development having matches. That kind of attraction to a product comes when a team focuses on making a quality product and hits on something golden. The development teams of Mortal Kombat or Primal Rage saw the monster hit that was Street Fighter and copied the shell without copying the gameplay. What resulted were horrible fighting games that looked good and were edgy, but had horrible balancing issues. The core gameplay in X-Blades consists of button mashing, which should make this game the background for this website, but I have this thing against associating myself with the unrespectable bits of society. Gaijin put too many ways of distpatching enemies into X-Blades without balancing their effects. The main character, Ayumi, wields swords, guns and magic. Rising Zan was a fun sword/gun fighter and so is Devil May Cry, but the more unique weapons you give a character the more variables the developers have to juggle. Enemies spawn non-stop until you have killed a certain amount, dictated by the difficulty level. Each enemy has either a weakness to an elemental magic, swords or bullets, but concentrating on dispatching a single enemy lets all others pick at you bit by bit. I get the feeling that Gaijin sensed this hole and tried to patch it by having small time slowing animations at certain points like once every two blade strikes or slowing the character falling animation if you continue to fire your guns or swing your sword. X-Blades would have benefitted from Max Payne bullet-time feature, but with the number of enemies that are thrown at the player it would have become a lot more monotonous than it already is. Trust me, monotony is something that you would not have wanted more of in X-Blades. Every environment makes use of the same textures and color scheme, the enemies are always variations of only a handful of unique models, mini-bosses have so much health that hitting them non-stop with your most powerful spell still takes many whole minutes for them to die. The three characters are cookie-cutter, making them very hard to identify with, which makes sense since the player is only meant to stare at Ayumi's ass or point the camera at her cleavage and watch her breasts bounce when she walks. Character development is entirely behind scenes. The cinematic at the end of one level will show Ayumi shallowly interact with a character then the next end level cinematic shows that character acting very differently for unknown reasons. If you go for the good ending then throughout the game you will see the progression of Ayumi and Jay go from strangers to best friends forever to soul mates with no reason why! Although, once again, it makes sense; Gaijin wanted the player to get the feeling like it is super easy to get with a hot woman. The title screen features a mix of pretty 2D images, a rotating 3D background, a boring system font and music that was picked more because of its contemporary sound rather than its relevance to the game. Ayumi's gun sounds are nice, but consist of three bites with slightly different tones each. The ricochet is nice, but ever present no matter what surface you fire at. Every fight the same metal soundtrack plays and gets old quickly. Spells offer the only color in this game, but the lighting effects are so over done that I would often be fighting with half or more of my screen taken up by bloom effects. Swinging Ayumi's gunswords you see a red contrail following the very wide strikes and it looks impressive. That feeling quickly turned into frustration in the first level when I noticed how bad the collision detection is. There are breakable objects set up amongst the levels for your amusement. Breaking more of them can give you a small bonus to your currency at the end of a level. The three basic breakable items are vases, statues and coffins. The smaller sized vases you must hit with your guns because the swords swing over the top of them, but you have to be spot-on or the shot doesn't count. I have pointed the guns right at a vase and the vase does not explode. The wide sword arc I mentioned above has only one point on it that counts as a hit. Out of 270 degrees of motion an item gets broken only if it is in the path of that 1 degree of damage. A sword like that in real life would replace Russian Roulette. I am thankful for the horrible collision only when casting projectile spells since it takes too much time for the set up before the spell is cast, leaving Ayumi wide open to the multitude of monsters that want to take bites out of her shoulder. However, only about half the time does Ayumi actually react to an enemy hit, cancelling the spell. The game was artificially lengthened by having the player go through the entire progression of levels a second time in the evening. Area of effect spells take too much time showing Ayumi jump into the air then showing a close up of her angry face as she prepares the spell. The number of enemies in each area is ridiculous. The game actually did feel longer than it was simply because I spent so friggin' long dispatching battalions of enemies. On the surface X-Blades looks like it would be a good game. Gaijin clued into the fact that they actually had a stinking pile and did what most companies do to offset quality, they promoted the hell out of it. On this very site God Hand is given a glowing recommendation, yet X-Blades falls horribly short and here is the reason why. God Hand is satire of fighting games in general. God Hand had the omnipresent metal soundtrack, the character development holes, the over-the-top special moves, but it was all backed up by gameplay more solid than an iron cube encased in steel and laced with titanium. The God Hand Capcom team set out to make a pure fighter and they did. It's like driving, watch where you are going and you'll get there. Don't focus on other things irrelevant to your goal.
-Matthew |
