Blade of Darkness

The Good
This game is full of content. The levels are huge and rather realistic castles, the musics are awesome and plentiful, there are over a hundred different weapons and several enemy types. The technology was also a few years ahead of the competition, with nice physics and realistic shadows years before Doom 3 or Max Payne 2. The gore effects are also very realistic. With good moves you can chop the enemy into pieces, painting the walls with dark red. Gore can also be turned off for the faint of the heart.

Blade of Darkness is also a very hard game, in fact one of the hardest I've played. Fights require precision and fast reflexes, and the rather good combat AI makes it a pleasure to boot. A couple of the boss monster fights were very memorable. There are also some puzzles, but none of them is so tough. They only make you more cautious, as a careless player can often run into an obvious trap and die at an instant.

Some RPG elements also are a big bonus. As you kill more, you gain experience, learn new moves and get more stamina. The set of moves becomes large by the end of the game, but as you've been learning them gradually, it's not so hard to master. This game made me feel that I really became a good swordsman by the end of the game, and that's an achievement! Even though it's set in a fantasy medieval world, there are no real magic users in the game. Well, those would've been a let-down in a melee combat game anyway.

The Bad
As much as I liked BoD, it has some problems. Sometimes the movement was awkward and you fell off a ledge too easily. Or some enemies were placed too cunningly, shooting arrows at you from a distance, so the situation was frustratingly hard to solve. A couple of monsters were so tough I had to load at least 20 times to make it. And the game starts as very hard, but gets a bit easier on the middle and latter parts of the game, which is a bit upside down from what I'd expect.

The story is also lame, but not very essential to an action game like this so I didn't care. Had it been more involving though, maybe I wouldn't have become bored at the middle part of the game. Yup, at times it feels like there's just too many ogres to be slain and the game feels like it'll never end. But towards the end it got more intense again and made me hooked to my seat until it was over.

The movement takes a while to master but it's pretty intuitive once you get it, allowing you to fight efficiently.

The Bottom Line
Blade of Darkness is a pleasant experience for players who enjoy melee combat games (even such games that have only duels, like Tekken or Mortal Combat), some adventure, and who think of themselves as good players. Many of my friends didn't like it because they couldn't get past the first few maps without dying all the time.

Overall I though this was game of the year material.

The Good
This game presents an excellent gameplay based in combo-moves.As a result there are numerous moves for each of the 4 fighters.Graphics and audio are pretty good,and both create an appropriate epic atmosphere.

The Bad
The gameplay is a bit complicated for beginners.Blood and gore which may irritate some can be easily turned off.Generally,there's nothing bad in the game.

The Bottom Line
Blade Of Darkness is a really addictive action game which features many weapons,4 characters to choose from and loads of blood!It is also a quite big and hard game,so it promises many hours of gameplay.Graphics and audio of the game are pretty good and fortunately it will play good on low-end systems too.Highly recommended to action-lover's.

The Good
Levels:
The levels are HUGE, and the game seems never ending (untill you reach the end). I don't know haw many hours it takes to finish the game, but it can't be done in one day. The levels are so big they feel like real castles and caves and more castles with some caves and mines underneath. Level objects are huge, it makes your character look so really small.

The Graphics:
It's some of the best I've seen in the level design. The water looks like water, not Quake style water. The fire looks good, and the lighting is so good it looks almost real. The lighting is good because of the real shadows, it's not just a black dot under the character, it's a real shodow. the only funny thing about it is the fact that even the smallest candle in the game can made an awesome shadow. Other game makes can learn from the lighting in this game.

The Combat:
It's hard in the beginning, but it gets better as the game goes on. The main thing is to fight smart. The first few levels I beat the orcs by throwing my weapons at them, running around, getting my weapons back and throwing some more at the orc. It's not all run in and start hacking away in the beginning. The thing that makes the game so hard in the beginning is the fact that the character doesn't have the energy to even use the basic weapons. After two slashes the my character's out of energy and the enemy chops his head off. That makes for some creative fighting tricks to fool the enemy AI. Like they won't go past certain points on the map so you reach that point and make the enemy turn back and that's when I run up and hit him while his back is turned. This tactic won't always work, but in the beginning of the game I use every trick I can think of.

Now later on in the game it's gets beter. The character will have enough energy to use a good weapon. I kept a weapon I found in the second level the whole game. At first I could only swing it once and be out of energy, but later on I could keep swinging it as long as I needed to. But for characters like the Barbarian you need the biggest and baddest weapon to win the day.

Characters have different fighting styles. The slow Barbarian uses combos and big weapons. The short and fast Dwarf is more a open style fighting guy and uses light weapons. The Knight is good for speed and has some good combos. The Amazon is fast.

The barbarian sucks against groups of enemies, but can take any single enemy out easy. The dwarf is a hard target for the bigger and slower enemies, and the dwarf is also good at dodging enemy atacks, using dwarf can get real crazy (I like the Dwarf). The Knight fights with style, he's fast and uses good moves.

The gore is off the wall, sometimes all over the walls. One of the first kills I saw was with the Dwarf, this huge door opens (lifting up), a single goblin comes charging through. I told my friend to try and throw the axe, he did, and it decapitated the goblin. Or one a threw an axe it bounced and chopped an orc's foot off. Later on when you start fighting multiple enemies at once using combos that can chop orcs in to a bunch of peaces it gets messy. There's also a matrix cheat, so you can see the parts fly in super slow motion while the camera pans around the fight.

It is possible to finish the game, my friend did it with the barbarian. I got far, but Lightning took care of his computer, so now I have to do it on my computer with IRQ conflicts, on board video, and all.

Even though my computer has allot of problems that makes Half-Life run slow, Blade of Darkness runs OK (playable).

The Bad
The AI was predictable. Some clipping problems, like fighting through thin walls. And I fell half way into the floor once and died jumping down 5 feet. The character was doing it's falling to death animation on the ground LOL. Enemy only has a few death animations they get old really fast and if you take their legs their bodies float in the air, and stays there, bodies and parts do vanish after a while. So, you won't see floating ones all over the place.

The Bottom Line
It's hard but possible to beat. Has the same kind of action feel as Serious Sam. It keeps getting better the more the game progresses.