Surgency Games

For me it is. I’m all about first impressions. Games that start good and get progressively worse hold much more interest for me in both my head and my heart than games that start bad and get progressively better. I may have a short attention span, but if you can’t entertain me within a small amount of time, honestly, I have better things to do. There are books to read, shows to watch and, most importantly, other games to play.

X-Blades opens with a cutscene that I didn’t hate: Ayumi, a scrappy, obnoxiously over-sexualized anime girl walks through some generic ruins and talks about how she’s looking for some long lost relic that’s meant to contain the power of a god. I’m not a fan of exposition and this intro is aggressively interested in getting to the game as quick as possible without explaining too much. Job well done. Outside of the annoying character and the voice acting, this set-up works pretty well.

The first room in the game where you fight some enemies is rather bland. The enemies are… Also bland. And also annoying. If they stand near you, they hurt you. If their attacks were actually animated, I missed it. If you’re taking damage, you can’t attack. So you jump out of the group, turn back to the enemies, get in a few more hits, then you’re surrounded again and you have to jump out of the group to get your bearings and be able to attack again.

Oddly, you have a hit counter tracking the number of consecutive hits you get in an attack sequence. The higher you check up the number, the more SOULS you’ll get after the fight is over. The more SOULS you get, the more crap you can unlock for your anime girl. Abilities like FIREBALL, EARTHQUAKE and other such shit is available right from the start. Spend some SOULS, buy an ability, assign it to a face button in a minimalist menu that looks like it should be placeholder and you’ll be good to go.

The game taught me, by way of tutorial text that was too small to read from the comfort of couch, to buy EARTHQUAKE. Then, when I build up RAGE by attacking enemies I can cast EARTHQUAKE in a slow-motion frenzy of half-made particle effects. Every enemy I fought in the game – save the boss – could be killed with a single EARTHQUAKE. I renamed the ability (and the Y Button which I had assigned it to) the “I Win” skill. I continued to collect SOULS but didn’t spend them. What was the point. I cast EARTHQUAKE and I won.

But then, the rub. I come to a hallway filled with ICE ELEMENTALS who can only be killed by FIREBALLS. Ah ha! The game was forcing me to buy new abilities to fight specific types of enemies. That’s interesting. I guess. Not as interesting as if each ability had a strength and weakness in its use and that I (the player, the gamer, the interactor) got to choose what to use based off of the situation. But still. Two points for trying, right?

So, I assign my FIREBALL to the B Button; a face button, the button I use by pressing it with my right thumb. And I cast my first FIREBALL and the ICE ELEMENTAL dies. I do this three more times. Three more ICE ELEMENTALS die. But now, it appears I’m out of RAGE and when I press the B Button, Ayumi glows, looks like she’s charging up some sort of “bitchin’-awesome” attack and then does nothing. I press the B Button again and she casts a FIREBALL but it doesn’t hit the ICE ELEMENTAL.

Try again.

So I do. And again I fail. And again. And again. I was stuck in this hall with no way to build my RAGE outside of holding the B Button, which I think is what I’m supposed to do, but not quite sure because the game never told me. So then I try to lock-on to the ICE ELEMENTAL, but this can only be done by aligning the center of the camera up with the enemy and as soon as it moves, I’m not targeting it anymore. So in order to do what I need to do, I need to manipulate the right analogue stick and the B Button… Simultaneously! Something I have yet to figure out to do.

Perhaps this is a personal failing.

X-Blades has a cool central character with an annoying voice. (If you’re in to over-sexed, perhaps-not-yet-eighteen anime characters.) The character is obviously lovingly crafted and executed at a high level of detail that has the potential to excite and engage a very large segment of gamers.

It seems like once the character was made, nothing else mattered. The sword-play is too fast and has no heft to it. The gun-play is simply a rip-off of Devil May Cry (not inherently a bad thing) but much slower and much less cool to watch (definitely a bad thing). The enemy and level design is bland and is nowhere near as imaginative as the main character and the core interactions with the title, the way you fight and move and explore and bypass challenges, are poorly thought out and in no way aligned with the expectations of the genre.

There were better hack-and-slash games last generation. Rygar. Devil May Cry. God of War.

There’s too much missing here. The entertainment value will be low for anyone who has picked up an XBOX 360 or PlayStation 3 game in the last three years. The artistry is focused too much on one character and not enough on a world or enemies that are interesting and interactive.

I played X-Blades for thirty minutes on the XBOX 360 right after lunch.

Is this a fair assessment? Perhaps not. But the game offers little proof that it is deserving of more.

Post Script: All proper nouns from the game (save Ayumi) have been capitalized here for the best possible reading experience. When reading these words, imagine a large bodybuilder, standing right over your shoulder, shouting things such as EARTHQUAKE and SOULS. That doesn’t happen in the game, but it could potentially make it more exciting.