South Peak Interactive was on hand promoting the upcoming
hack & slash game, entitled X-Blades. It’s developed by Gaijin Entertainment & TopWare Interactive, and
features a scantily clad main character, named Ayumi. The basic premise of the game is a button
masher with an attractive female protagonist. I had been looking forward to this game for a long time, so I will share
my impressions of the game with you.
It was a very easy game to pick up and just jumping in and
having fun killing the monsters. Your
main weapons are 2 swords and your gun, and you can also learn and equip magic
spells to certain buttons. The Y button
will trigger a special attack when you’ve built up enough energy to release it. You can also roll away from enemies and jump
into the air where your guns are most useful in my opinion.
When I started off playing, I was basically fighting bugs,
flying monsters, and weird demon/dinosaur hybrid things. I immediately noticed
the lack of a user controlled targeting system, and asked the developers/PR people
on hand if there was one. To my
disappointment the guy said there was not and it was all on auto. Most of the time this didn’t seem to hamper
any of the gameplay, but there were quite a few instances where I was trying to
fight one monster and would be targeted on another quite far away. As I got the controls down, and it’s a very
easy learning curve, I was hacking, slashing, shooting and using my magic on
the monsters. As I was playing that area
of the level, I found myself enjoying the overall feel and gameplay of
X-Blades.
Unfortunately, after finishing up that section of the level,
I moved on to the big boss battle, and this is where things got extremely
frustrating. The boss was a large
monster feeding on the enemies of the smaller monsters running around, so the
objective is to continuously kill the monsters on the ground while attacking
the larger monster with fire and or light magic. Sounds simple enough, but it’s no where near
being simple. The guy instructing me on
the boss battle wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining this part, and
things just got down right frustrating. I started killing off the smaller monsters and firing off magic at the
larger boss as they were killed off, but somehow the boss was taking zero
damage. I noticed the smaller monsters
kept coming back, and when one died, immediately another was in its place. I asked the guy if they respawn and how to
stop it from happening, but he just stood there telling me there is no respawn,
just the boss creating more. Maybe I’m
an idiot, but that’s basically the same thing, so there was never an opening
there long enough to damage the boss. I
tried for about 10 minutes before putting the controller off in frustration and
utter anger at the guys running the booth. Maybe it will be easier to decipher what is needed to be done for the
boss battle when you’re home and have the time to really think out strategies
in the game.
This game is currently scheduled to be released in early
October, at around $59.99 according to Amazon.com. After playing the demo at PAX, I hope they
realize this is a budget title at best, and bring the price down to $39.99,
because I wouldn’t recommend this title at any price higher than that. It’s a mindless hack & slash shooter
using sex to help sell the game, and I went into PAX with high hopes for this
game, but instead left disappointed. Don’t get me wrong though, as this game has a lot of potention, if they delay the game a couple months and tweak some game mechanics. And who knows, maybe the demo doesn’t do it justice, but it definitely didn’t help the game any.