Some characters are shielded by a red field. These enemies require rewinded versions of yourself, to break the field. This requires many copies and is quite annoying to do. Many of these enemies require something like rewind, do, rewind, do, rewind, do, rewind, do, rewind and then finally kill him. However, you have to remember that altering time, will alter what happens to the enemy. To give you an idea, you might shoot an enemy back the first time, then in another line knock him further back, but in the final line you will knock him down. Knocking him down, might make some versions of yourself, start attacking nothing. This can get annoying, since you have to rewind/redo several more times.
Finally, many of the time puzzles are tedious. In addition to figuring out how they’re done, you will also need to time out each action. If you give yourself too little time, you will need to redo it. While most of them are pretty easy, they can become extremely tedious. This is especially true when you fight Chaos Monsters. This is because you need to make sure he’s distracted enough, to complete the objective. If you fail to do so, he will attack you, which might lead to your death.
Gameplay
For the most part, the gameplay is pretty solid, but there were some poorly planned things. For instance, many attacks don’t lead into another so you might be using your gun, but pushing triangle (kick) won’t do anything, nor will circle (magic). Although you can easily lead swap to sword attacks and use them. Additionally, some inputs are somewhat dodgy. I had many instances where dodging resulted in me doing the grab, though I still got hit. Small errors like that can easily cost you your life. Another poor element, is the lack of auto look (moves the camera where you’re looking) or locking on. These two elements could have made the game far more accessible.
Besides controls, the game can get boring to watch. For the most part, your attacks are less diverse than the average Dyansty Warriors title. Every magic has two styles, which only alter based off tier. All tier one will look similar and the same goes for tier two. Sword attacks are basically a bunch of random slashes, which hardly stand out. Kicks are a little more interesting, though it’s just going straight up in the air. It would have been nicer to see a more diverse move set.
Quality
Like the diversity of attacks, Blades of Time has a lot of problems with overall quality. This is very apparent with graphics. After the game starts with a pretty well done opening, the rest of the game looks rather low end. Your average cutscene is just in game models talking, but there are a few higher end scenes. Nothing in the game quite matches the openings quality, which is a huge disappointment.
While the cutscenes might look poor, you’ll most likely notice the “lip sync”. Yes, they’re so bad, that lip sync needed quotation marks. You might not notice this at first, but some scenes are so bad that it’s hard to believe someone quality assured them. Some common problems were, early mouth movements and showing other mode moving their lips, while someone else is still talking. Shockingly, I found the mouth movements to be far worse. This is because the model was not matching what was being said. These two elements can easily ruin your overall experience.
VERDICT
Blades of Time is hardly amazing, but it’s a neat experience nonetheless. While the gameplay is fun, it could be better or at least varied. Thankfully, the story isn’t that bad, though the quality of the game might ruin the experience for you. In the end, Blades of Time is a decent $40 game, but you might be better off waiting for a lower price. It’s certainly a decent hack and slash title, although some attention to detail would have greatly paid off.
[Editor’s Note: Blades of Time was reviewed on the Playstation 3 hardware. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]