Review: BLADESTORM: The Hundred Years War

Gameplay: 7
Sound: 5
Graphics: 7
Value: 7
Overall: 6.8

The Good:
· Unique control scheme that actually works
· Good art direction
The Bad:
· Terribly repetitive gameplay
· No multiplayer

Everybody knows Dynasty Warriors. Even if you don’t like it (which is advisable nower days), you’re probably going to recognise it if you see it. Koei have done a good job of making a name for themselves as a major developer of hack and slash games. Bladestorm does a great job of breaking their usual formula; with a more realistic art style and a combat system that doesn’t give you a serious case of the gamer’s thumb after playing for half an hour.

The basic concept for the game is written in the title: Hundred year war. In the game you play as a hired mercenary in a war between the English and the French which supposedly lasts for around about a hundred years. How you choose your missions is extremely different to how you go about doing the same thing in Warriors, when you start the game you can create your character which would be a good feature but as you get into the game you collect so much armour that you can’t tell what your character looks like anyway, nevertheless, it’s still nice to know that it’s there. After creating your character, you are taken to the hub of the game which is a small pub. In the pub you have the ability to buy and sell items, upgrade your gear, level up your character’s skills using Experience points that you’ve collected on the battlefield, swap and upgrade your different units, and finally and most crucially, select a ballet field to play on. All of the different options are easy to access which is great because in this sort of game, all you want to be doing in dicing fools on the battlefield.

When you’ve finished in the pub, you can set off into battle. In Bladestorm, there are lots - and I mean lots – of battlefields. Well, actually, there’s about five or six of them. The thing that makes them so awesome however, is their size. When you’re choosing a place to start fighting, you choose out of the five or six main areas and then you’re zoomed into an even more detailed map which has all of the bases (yours and the enemies) and you can choose where to start playing. When you’re choosing a place to play you’ll have to take your objective into consideration because to get from one side of the map to the other could take you twenty minutes or more!

The objectives in the game are pretty straight forward if you’ve ever played a hack and slash before. All you’re going to be asked to do is defend or attack a base. Because the missions are so straight forward and without variation, they’re going to get pretty boring pretty fast, which is stupid on the developers part because the game is so long. If you do all of the missions for both the English and the French you’re going to be looking at around sixty hours of gameplay. That’s probably the worst thing about Bladestorm. They advertised it saying that it’s so long, yet ironically, its length detracts from the overall experience because the gameplay is all the same.
When you first start playing the game, you’re probably going to feel mostly refreshed. Other hack and slashes are extremely ‘Japanesy’ in their art design but Bladestorm kind of moves away from that with French locals which stem from great pine forests to snowy wastelands. Granted, these are really great for the first four or five hours of game play but soon after that you’ll be begging for somewhere new, but unfortunately that’s all you’re going to get.

The combat is probably the most interesting thing about Bladestorm because it attempts something which isn’t really the one thing in hack and slashes. You’ll probably find that in these kinds of games you’re going to be tapping down the ‘X’ button like a crazy, but you won’t find that in Bladestorm. The basic attack button here is the ‘RB’ shoulder button, which is an extremely interesting choice of button mapping. You wouldn’t think that that would be the best choice for the attack button, but because you’re only holding it in, it isn’t that much of a pain and after a while you’ll acclimatise to having your fingers in such a weird place on the controller. It’s not like you’re only using RB to attack – you have your squad’s special attacks mapped to the ‘B’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ face buttons on the pad which is a really great decision because you’re going to need to use them quite frequently when the enemy squadrons and base leaders start to get tough. The ability to control your squad is a really nice addition to Bladestorm and it really sets it apart from the Warriors franchises, giving Koei two really different hack and slash franchises with very unique properties.

Overall, BLADESTORM: The Hundred Years' War is an average hack and slash game with some unique features. If you’re a fan of Koei games, there’s a fair chance that you’re going to really like this first in a promising new series.

--Tom Rhodes, 360Stage--