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!