X-Blades Review

X-Blades on any format would be reprehensible, yeah; I'm experimenting with bigger words these days. Playstation 3, Xbox 360 or whatever the poor hardware this travesty of sorts would fit on. In the case of this review it's for the PS3 version and before you start to cry out there old fanboys, just shut the hell up. I'd rag on this even if it were on the 360, so shut your craws and go back to trolling news sites.

X-Blades should be called, nearly naked X-Girl May Cry IV because it so badly wants to be Devil May Cry, it sneaks out of the house late at night and puts on a blonde wig and red coat. It returns lurching home drunkenly in the morning only to find that it forgot to pick up keys and has to wake the household to be let back in. If that analogy doesn't work for you, try the simpler dialogue line, one from Beneath a Steel Sky: its crap son.

I am sorry, there's no way that I can be anything but brutally honest about this attempt to ape Devil May Cry and make it fun. X-Blades is in regard to fun what listening to fanboys rant about Console and PC/Mac/TV/Movie/Book/Comic/Anything is to World Peace.

Story

Cute anime Chick #347 with hardly any pants on, must do stuff to save a place that...you know what, I'm not going to really bother here. It's a bad story, its derivative and it's told with all the storytelling skill of three spider monkeys typing on an iPhone. It does nothing to bring you into the game and only serves to make you want to throttle things.

I won't spoil the story if you're brave enough to play.

Gameplay

Ah Devil May Cry, we love you. We love you so much we decided that we'd make a game that completely apes this and wants to be Japanese. In fact it so badly wants to be Japanese that it might as well come in a box labelled sushi and wrapped in a damn kimono. The Gameplay is clunky and unforgiving, it's about as fluid as rock. The lock on system is so badly designed that you can't actually choose the target you're supposed to lock on.

Lock on a pray that you got the right one, yeah, clever.

You have sword-gun things, gunblades, like in Final Fantasy 8 (yay, I suppose) and you have magic powers, boom, whoosh, bang kind of stuff. You also have access to incredible combat moves, animated with the highest of quality in any game ever made (not). Wait; let me save that for the animation section. You have a bunch of combat moves and you can buy more, you can upgrade things with the souls of your enemies (DMC again) and you can do all those cool things that Dante can do, only you're a squeaky voiced anime girl obviously designed by some ADHD suffering weaboo in Russia.

The movement is bad, it seems sluggish and the buttons are unresponsive. Next!

Graphics

Ayumi (oh there's a surprise at the name) is a badly designed character right from the start. As previously mentioned, she seems to have spawned from the mind of some designer who basically had a check list.

1. Dante

2. Add tits

3. Show ass

4. Add sword gun stuff

5. COOL!

Somewhere between concept and completion, X-Blades might have sounded cool. It might have even been cool, it's not though. The graphics are sub standard and it's got that much bloom effect lighting and over the top flash effects that it wins the award for the game most likely to give your grandmother epilepsy and harm kittens 2009. So there's not much I can say since the monsters are generic and the character is about as sexist as you can get without a label on the game that says: hey weaboo fanboys, here's your tits and ass every other game promised but failed to deliver.

Bad graphics plus so-called SEXY do not a good game make!

Bad weaboos, no biscuit!

Animations

Badly created characters, animated with all the care of a truck laden with nitro-glycerine driving down a bumpy road. This describes the animations in X-Blades perfectly. It's not done very well at all, appears jerky and there are times that Ayumi transforms from ugly woman into long limbed monstrosity when the animators obvious along with the artists, failed to study proper human anatomy. Either that or she's the spawn of a frenzied coupling between Urotsukidoji and a human woman, if you don't know what the former is (some gamers may not know the latter either), google it.

Physics

There's some in there, kind of, perhaps. Actually I'm not sure, so I'm just going to say, doesn't really seem like it.

Level Design

Just bad, combined with the dodgy controls the platform sections are frustrating and highly annoying.

AI

The enemies are dumb, not only do they look generic and dumb; they also are dumb, totally. There's nothing that resembles AI here. Move along Luke, move along.

Sound

There's sound and it really doesn't get much better or worse. It's nothing to shout about, so I'm going to say it does the job and leave it at that.

Music

I found it irritating and badly arranged, it does nothing to help the atmosphere of the game and anyone who doesn't agree, has no ear for music at all. A warbling cat would have a better soundtrack.

Voice and Dialogue

If I could I would slaughter the dialogue writer, the voice actors and probably the whole cast. Ayumi especially, she has a voice that grates like a thousand cheese graters and is about as sexy as watching endless reruns of a Discovery Channel special on making glass bottles.

Multiplayer

None, thank god. It is bad enough playing it on your own, sharing this monstrosity with friends is enough cause to have you locked up for mental and physical cruelty.

Something else here

It's not that X-Blades is a bad game, or a mediocre game. It's not a game; it's a torture device and obviously has been designed to subtly degrade the IQ of anyone who has the unfortunate luck to play it. Also, it's a terrible experience, one I wouldn't even recommend to the worst of my enemies.

Yeah, I'm looking at YOU!

P.S. any fanboy that attempts to defend this title needs to seriously jump off a bridge and die.