Review: Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War (360)

Normally, when the postie delivers new games to be reviewed to Gamestyle towers, it’s an event to enjoy. However, it was with a heavy heart that Gamestyle opened our latest delivery from Koei. After all, they’ve been responsible for some of our least favourite games with the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors series. But when we saw that Koei had not sent us another Warriors game, but the all new Bladestorm, our hearts lifted a little bit. Surely Bladestorm must be improvement?

Raising our hopes of a better experience, Bladestorm’s packaging promises “Real-time Action” with the ability to “issue troop commands”. Brilliant! A real-time strategy game; a huge problem with the Warriors series of games was the inability to order about the troops who would stand around like statues whilst you took on the entire opposing army. Even the creaky Far-Eastern pseudo history has been shown the door, with Bladestorm’s conflict set during the Hundred Years war between Britain and France, with the player cast as a mercenary, free to accept contracts from either side.

Bladestorm kicks off with a sumptuous animated introduction and whilst Gamestyle is fairly sure that some of the armour on display isn’t historically accurate and that Edward, the Black Prince, didn’t had a long flowing mane of jet-black hair or wear a matching suit of black armour, it still looks good. In fact, the entire game is full of silly armour, eye-patches and pirate hats which we’re not sure are being used in the correct historical context. Bladestorm’s voice-over work also fails to fit the historical bill and veers between woeful and unintentionally hilarious.

However, despite all the promise, after a few minutes of playing Bladestorm it soon becomes apparent that it’s a flawed combination of action and strategy and a pretty poor game all round. The create-a-character mode when you first start the campaign mode is laughably limited, particularly when you look at what companies like EA have recently achieved. After creating a character, and between every mission, you’ll be sent to the Tavern. Here you can buy equipment from the silly-voiced merchant, hire soldiers, upgrade various attributes and, most importantly of all, accept contracts.

Once a contract has been accepted, you’re sent out to the battlefield. It soon becomes apparent that the combat mechanics and battlefield graphics are a slightly tweaked version of those seen in the Warriors games, complete with combos racking up in the corner of the screen. Ultimately though, the combat here is even less engaging than the button-mashing of the Warriors games. To attack, you simply walk up to the enemy and hold down the right bumper to attack. And that’s it. You aren’t required to press the right bumper repeatedly, or even to time attacks, just keep it held down. If you’ve taken a unit of troops with you, they will also attack as long as the right bumper is held down. Each unit also has three rechargeable special moves, which vary depending on how they are armed, activated by pressing one of the face buttons. It’s barely worth the effort though, given most opponents can be beaten by simply keeping the right bumper held down. The special moves look especially silly as all the soldiers in unit perform them in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.   

The strategy element of the game is hardly anymore advanced than the action element. You can only assume control of one unit at a time so it’s impossible to manage a multi-pronged assault on an enemy base. Once you leave a unit to assume command of another they either stand around or run away. It’s only the units controlled by other mercenaries that will fight in a sensible way, and they’ll often set out only to achieve the contract objective. If they achieve it, the whole battle ends regardless of whether you wanted it to or not. Contracts, and therefore battles, often take place over a number of days. Each day is about 10 minutes of game time. It’s therefore possible to roam the battlefield before finally focussing on the objective towards the end of the contract time, building up experience and fame levels on the way by defeating enemy units and seizing bases. However, captured bases don’t remain captured. Accept a subsequent contract in the same region and all the bases will have reverted back to their original ownership, making the whole exercise feel futile. It’s also possible to wander around the battlefield whilst all the action takes place somewhere else, hardly seeing another sole as the AI fights over one or two objectives, leading to a feeling of being disjointed from the action and an uneven gameplay experience. Seizing a base and then not seeing anyone until you take the next one, suggests that the maps are simply too big and that the developers might have done better to focus on a tighter, more intense experience. The tactical information provided in both the pause menu and the mini-map simply isn’t detailed enough, making following the ebb and flow of battle difficult to follow.

Bladstorm’s battlefields are foggy to say the least, with sparse landscapes with little to fill the monotony between the enemy bases. The game impresses in terms of numbers of characters on-screen at once, but it’s ridiculously easy to lose track of your mercenary amongst the numbers and end up being killed when it’s impossible to see what’s happening properly.

Sadly, Bladestorm isn’t an improvement on the Warriors games. An awkward mish-mash of action and strategy, which fails to succeed on either count. The combat is monotonous and the strategy underdeveloped. One to avoid.

Rating: 4 / 10

Words by Andy Lucas