Bladestorm is an interesting game. It brings a more realistic Dynasty Warriors type of gameplay, and mixes it with squads, tactics, and general purpose. Not only this, but it blends RPG elements, tactical-squad combat and arcade action together into an interesting mess. This results in a fresh and rather enjoyable (at least for a while) experience.
It’s too bad that the idea is tarnished so. First of all, I’ll start with the graphics – to get the least important, and least impressive, elements out of the way first. I’ll be blunt – they’re crap. Or maybe crap is not exactly accurate. In the context of a next-gen, Playstation 3 game, the graphics suck ass – if it was a PS2 game, however, they’d be rather impressive. The most impressive thing about the graphics is how many single characters can be on screen at once, and even then, if there’re too many (despite the fact that my PC could probably handle it) my PS3, with its 7 processing-handling processors, the cell chip, 60gb hardrive and all that, still slows down. It’s pretty offensive that they made a PS3 game that looks like a PS2 game, and then let the frame rate stutter.
Well, now that’s out of the way, we can move on to the gameplay, which is by far the best aspect of the game. You play as a mercenary in the 100 years war (between the English and French, that’s all you need to know); you choose your own contracts, your own squads (we’ll get to that later), and your own way across the battlefield. As the game constantly reminds you, you are allied with no side, just the money they pay you with. Before your first contract, you start in a tavern (a mercenaries’ tavern, of course), and the barkeep talks at you for a while, explaining a few simple things – that there’s a war, that you can profit from it, other such stuff. After he finishes talking at you, you’ll go to a menu (that will swivel around the common room of the bar when you navigate through it). The first thing you’ll want to do is go to contract.
There are a few differences between contracts, but only 2/3 you’ll really need to pay attention to. First, there’s the money. This is (argueably) the only thing that matters; how much you’re being paid to help whatever side of the war’s paying you. Second, there’s the difficulty – which is stars, one star being the easiest. The harder a contract is, the more you’ll get paid. Third, there’s the contract type, most of which are seize and maintain, which doesn’t really involve any maintaining. You just have to capture one or more forts of the enemy (either English or French). There’s also the side, which is either English or French. If you’re English (or, indeed, French) and were terribly patriotic you could play only the English (or, indeed, French) missions if you were so inclined.
Of course, the only thing that really matters here is the money and maybe the difficulty if you’re not too confident with your abilities yet. So, you pick a mission and it’ll tell you what fort(s)/castle(s)/village(s)/etc you need to capture. Whatever you’re asked to capture, it’ll always say it’s a crucial position, so don’t feel too special when you see what you’re being honoured with the responsibility for. After this, you can choose where to start by selecting a square of the map and selecting a friendly fort/castle/village/etc. You should probably choose one reasonable close to your goal, unless you want to spend a very large amount of time marching your unit around.
When you start the contract you’ll notice two things; 1. The graphics look like PS2 graphics; 2. You’re on your own. It’s alright though, on your first mission you’ll get a tutorial on how to play the game which is disguised as a ‘skirmish’ you encounter on your way to the battlefield. How clever.
To cut it short, there are squads of different kinds of men on the battlefield that you can take control of using your character. The squads are infantry and cavalry, ranging from swordsmen to bowmen, from sword cavalry to…other cavalry. You pick a unit by walking up to it until it’s convenient floating icon over the unit lights up, then press X, your weapon will adjust according to whatever unit you have chosen. Each unit has different strengths, weaknesses and abilities. For example, swordsmen are good at close range fighting against other short-ranged infantry, but ineffective against cavalry and long-ranged infantry. Abilities are numerous, but they mostly have the same effects – particularly strong attacks, increasing defence/offense of current unit, etc. The abilities are activate by pressing square, triangle or circle. Holding R1 will cause your squad to charge and attack the nearest enemy squad normally. Archers handle differently, however. They do not have a close range attack, they use their abilities to attack with their bows, and if you’re engaged you’ve got to get the hell away before your squad is destroyed.
You can also activate what are, essentially, spells, which increase your squad’s offence/defence/mobility etc, or decrease enemy squads’, or even revive your dead squad-mates. You can recruit your own squads at the menu, so you could take control of one squad, walk into an enemy stronghold, and summon a few squads to help you, as they just appeared right next to you when you summon them.
The control system is very simple, which is good in some ways, bad in others. It’s good because it’s easy to get used to; it’s bad because it’s so easy it’s easy to forget that you’re in a squad, so much so that it can tend to feel like a Dynasty Warriors game with a few differences. On the other hand, charging enemies can be very cool at times; for example, when you press the scythe ability button and your squad swing their halberds, cutting down the enemy troops around you, it does feel rather satisfying. However, after the first few times, it gets pretty boring. It gets even more boring when you reach ‘zeal’ by raising your squad’s morale to maximum, so by killing many enemy squads. This causes you to cut through any enemy troops much faster than you would normally, so you’re simply running at enemies, hitting them a bit, and then running at more. Fortunately, it doesn’t last too long, and I suppose the fuzzy camera effect looks pretty good (in the context of the PS2-quality graphics).
Most of the battles are the same; grabbing a squad, running to an enemy fort of some kind, killing some squads until the fort commander appears, killing him, then you’ve captured the fort. Now go and do it again. Some squads are led by officers, which are stupidly over powerful – not particularly hard to kill after you get used to the game, but tedious. You hit them a bit and they fall over, then you hit them again and they fall over, and you keep doing this. Added to this, the initial appearance of tactics is misleading. The full extent of the tactics is not attacking anywhere without a squad, and probably attacking forts with a few allied squads. That is pretty much the tactics down.
The sound in the game is alright. The clang of swords, the charging sound. The voice acting is terrible. It sounds like comic relief medieval, the majority of the characters are hard to take seriously, and the rest of them are too impressive anyway. At least you can tell the French from the English though; the accents are easy to tell apart, after all.
Final Thoughts: Despite the interesting ideas, Bladestorm still manages to be shallow and, whilst it may grab your attention for a few hours, you won’t want to carry on playing for much longer – the repetitiveness of it all will make sure of that.