Blades of Time (2012)

Intro

This is a third-person action game in which you fight enemies with swords, spells, dashing and your rifle. There is also a bit of platforming.

Review

BOT isn't terrible. It looks decent for a 2012 game from a small studio and it has some interesting mechanics, like rewinding time. Sadly, it is completely linear and has bad voice acting, a nonsensical story and clunky design.

At some point you have to use rewind time to distract a monster, but the ability starts on a cooldown the moment it already notices you. It manages to grab you because of the bad hitboxes and you die... putting you back in the same position. This was after you fight a seemingly invulnerable guardian that can only be defeated by using a mechanic (enemy dash) that was only used for flying enemies previously, without any hint towards this. And in between there's the magic armor guy, who also has to be defeated by rewinding time, which is also poorly explained.

After getting killed by the unkillable monster a couple of times i just lost interest. The game just isn't worth your time.

Beat on loan from my coworker. After I had finished she offered to sell it to me but I didn't think it was a good enough game. She let me keep it. The biggest problem I had was the vertical look controls being reversed and not able to be changed. I ended up having to look up online how to change the settings on the console to get it to work properly. That's a ridiculous shortcoming for the game. Otherwise it was a reasonably fun game. I don't remember what specific abilities I preferred but I do remember the combat being challenging enough to demand regular use of time rewinding. It really is a badass implementation of time powers. Some of the platforming was annoying and I really appreciated the frequent checkpoint saves to help mitigate all those platforming fails. After beating the game I tried out the multiplayer mode by myself. It was nothing special but decent enough to play for a bit.

6.2/10

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.” -Bruce Lee

Alright so it has been a couple of weeks since I completed the main story of Blades of Time. It was a load of fun and I am happy to get around to writing about it to share my experience with you.

The game follows our protagonist Ayumi who is a treasure hunter. The way that I described it to my friends was kind of a mish-mash of Tomb Raider with Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. There are abilities that allow you to rewind time as in The Prince of Persia game but there is a twist. As you rewind time you also have your copy fighting alongside you. So as you can imagine there are more difficult times when you will be fighting beside many other copies of yourself, this allows you to take down larger groups than would be possible without the feature. It also allows you to take down more imposing monsters or bad guys who require more than one type of attack to be done to them at once. It was a very interesting feature and I really felt that it made the gameplay a blast.

I played the version on Steam for Mac, the controls felt very good with a mouse and keyboard but I can not speak for the Xbox 360 or PS3 set up. The way the primary and secondary attacks were assigned to the right and left mouse buttons was a great fit, and I only had a little trouble with the special abilities being on the number keys. Once you played for long enough in a row though these also felt very natural.

You gain the special abilities through these altars that Ayumi stumbles upon at the beginning of her journey. There are fire abilities, ice abilities, slides, and many others. The fire magic will ignite your foes while also setting your blades ablaze (say that 3 times fast) while the ice magic will freeze your foes and cause your blades to do ice damage upon striking. Ayumi is lost in a mysterious place that she becomes trapped in while searching for treasure. The realm is run by the powers of chaos and to return home she must figure out what is going on and how to handle it.

The game was developed by Gaijin Entertainment and was published in part by Konami. I really enjoyed the graphics in this game. The scenes were beautiful and the character models were interesting and well executed. I wasn’t sure I would be into the whole scantily clad female protagonist, but the gameplay and story really helped you see past all of that.

Ayumi gets separated from her friend and fellow treasure hunter Zero fairly early in the campaign. She is searching for him for much of the game after this and eventually finds him with a group of people who think that they have found a way out of their entrapment. The plan of this group does not appear like a solid one to Ayumi who goes on to defeat the forces of chaos and find the way out that will actually work, with a little help from Zero and her new found allies.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.wordpress.com/2017/06/11/blades-of-time/