Blade & Sword

Review - Sam wonders why they bothered...

Cast your mind back to 1996. It was the year of the Atlanta Olympic games, the X-Files was like a rash on the telly, OJ went on trial and Princess Di divorced Charles. It was also the year that Independence Day cascaded a foul smell down from its perch at the top of the box office and the first Diablo hacked its way into the gamer's consciousness. This was the game that really cemented Blizzard's power and eventually helped to usher in multiplayer gaming. Its success led to an inevitable wave of clones, most of which were quite poor. It's been a few years since we've seen one of these Diablo simulacra so I can speculate that Whiptail Interactive became convinced that the world desperately needed another substandard imitator of a dated game to help yank it free form the miasma which seems to be engulfing it today. Either that or they are such a deluded group of programmers that they believed the public would pay money for a program that looks like it started money as a job-catching demo of a coders skill.

Blade & Sword does a passable impression of coming up with some new ideas. It's set in the Far East you see. Which is just like Throne of Darkness, another Diablo clone released a few years back which gave you control of seven different fighters, but we shall let that pass. It includes combo fight moves, Street Fighter style. Please, someone splash some water on my face to let me know I'm not dreaming. It includes the most rudimentary of skill systems, and rather than mana you have chi. Otherwise this is Diablo in all but name, and that is Diablo 1, not the much refined sequel. The same repetitive clicking that was so enjoyable in the Diablo games is turned into an experience that can be fairly compared with jogging on feet flayed of all their skin.

I was bored within about five minutes. There's enough of the non-skipable, non-speed-upable, non-spoken and poorly translated text to bore the crap out of a Tolstoy fan. The graphics, in all their 800x600 glory (I'm serious), are muddy and poorly animated. The landscape is littered with impassable obstacles but no wildlife and the enemy creatures look like sick. The territories you pass through reminded me of all the worst features of those ancient labyrinthine dungeon crawls on 16-bit computers without any of the distracting artwork. It boasts full screen light and shadow effects, but I was less than impressed as I too could stencil in a shadow on M$ Paint like it seems the developers have done.

The combat is somewhat enlivened with all the chop-socky moves a levelled-up character can perform. It was so exciting I could barely wait for the opportunity to click the right mouse button rather then the left to unleash a power move. Some of these are kind of cool, but the combat system as a whole is devoid of cohesiveness and warrants no skill or effort on the player's part. The enemies are stupidly tough - I died confronting my eighth or so foe - but this is tough as in 'I have more hit points than this game has lines of code' rather than as a result of AI or scripted events. Oh, and they respawn with the glee of some horrible combination of a randy frog and a Tod McFarlane comic.

The baddies are also cursed with some spell which makes all their possessions disintegrate on death. Once in a while you will get a handful of coins but on the whole you have to buy any equipment you want. Which sucks. What's the point of killing all these baddies if there's no loot? Experience? So your character can waddle with more purpose through this boring and uninspired mess of a game?

There's 40 levels of this dross to wade through and a purported 140 hours of 'gameplay'. When you consider that a boss character will take more time to hack down into the ground than the Cassini probe took to get to Saturn this number is more of a threat than a reason to buy the game. The minimum system requirements are a P2 266 for god's sake!

Take this game and pop back in time seven years and I would have maybe scored it about a 60%, maybe seventy if the night before had been one of those lucky ones that were more prevalent for me back then. As it is 2004, I'm going to be somewhat harsher. While Blade & Sword is not a complete disaster - it does load after all, (wait a minute...) - I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would waste months of their life coding such an archaic and insipid game. Maybe there's a free gram of coke in the retail version as I can think of no other way that anyone would consider handing over the 25 quid RRP. Avoid like Gina G, another relic from '96.

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