Review

Mantling? Check.
Torches? Check.
Medieval Ruins? Check.
Dismemberment? Double check.

Sign me the hell up!

This could have been one of the coolest games I've ever played. Save for a few interface flaws and a horribly fragile renderer, Blade of Darkness (BoD) could be *THE* melee combat game. Instead, it must be content to take a well deserved seat among the few games that I whole-heartedly recommend. It is the best representation of its kind of gameplay that I've encountered. For 3D melee action, there is nothing better.

That concludes the normal portion of this review. Now I want to indulge in a comparison between Blade of Darkness and Rune. These two games represent textbook examples of Good Game Design and Bad Game Design, respectively. BoD is ten times the game that Rune is. Seriously, in every way that I wished Rune was better, BoD has it. In fact, go read my Rune Review now, just so we're on equal footing. It will make this go a lot faster. Where Rune had inexcusably simple combat, BoD has a deep, challenging, and intuitive system that turns (almost) every encounter into a tactical engagement. Where Rune has just a single attack, BoD has location-based attacks, suplemented by class-based attacks, supplemented by weapon-specific attacks, all moderated by a stamina system. It's rich.

I'll just go through my major Rune complaints and compare them to BoD:

• "Playing Rune means swinging large weapons at everything. Some of the weapons are sharp, some are blunt. The differences are inconsequential. Remember that bigger == better and you've learned the rules"

  In BoD, weapon differences are of paramount importance. First of all, BoD has 4 character classes: Knight, Barbarian, Dwarf, Amazon. On the most basic level, each character is proficient with a certain set of weapons. Oh, sure, you can pick up any weapon and try to use it, but the results are what you'd expect. Wield one of the weapons outside your expertise, and you'll only be capable of executing basic attacks, and clumsily at that. But that's just the simple part. Things get interesting when you factor in the defense/power characteristics of the weapons.

• "Unfortunately for Rune, the only way to get proficient with the combat is to fight against something else that is proficient. News flash - the AI isn't proficient."

  Well, BoD's AI isn't going to win any chess tournaments either, but the big difference is that it's consistently, entertainingly challenging. Rune's enemies were dumb as a post, and only slightly more aggressive. The baddies in BoD, categorically if not individually, have enough behavioral wit about them to at least appear intelligent enough not to eat dirt.

• "Ragnar's combat abilities are brutishly simplistic. Swing. Block. Dodge. Jump."

  Your surgical avatar in BoD also swings, blocks, dodges, and jumps. However, in Rune "swing" means swing, while in BoD, "swing" means "execute one of over two dozen attacks". And many of BoD's attacks are combos. Oh, and you can use a bow, as well. Oh, and after using a bow, you can (and should) retrieve your arrows.

• "Note that blocking is only an option if you've got a shield, and this is a good example of the underachieving feel of the combat. Let me put on my game designer cap for a second and ponder the possibilities of what should happen if I want to block and I don't have a shield. Thinking... Thinking... Eureka! Block with my weapon! Only it can't be a sustained block, as with the shield, but a timed block."

  You guessed it: if you're using a two-handed weapon in BoD, a block is a parry. And yes, you have to time it because it's not a sustained block as with a shield. Were these guys reading my mind?! No, it's just that obvious.

• "The larger weapons, namely the two-handed variety, take longer to swing, but have greater range. This sounds good in theory, but unfortunately the larger weapons are either too damaging, not slow enough, too ranged, or some combination of all of the above. This has the effect of producing a degenerate strategy that has everyone racing for the biggest weapons. The dwarven battle weapons are essentially the rocket launchers of Rune. It's impractical to prefer a quicker, more agile combat style using the one-handed weapons, and that's too bad."

  I mentioned the stamina system, right? Good, because that makes all these problems go away. The larger, more damaging weapons are slower to swing, yes, but heavier and more cumbersome, and absorb more stamina per swing, thus the yin to the yang. Adopting a highly agile style, with a lighter weapon, is not only possible, it's downright fun. There is no rocket launcher equivalent in BoD; it has a much better balanced weapon set. Furthermore, since each weapon comes with it's own special combo attack, you might develop a predilection for one weapon or another just as a matter of taste, or you might find yourself more proficient at executing a particular weapon's combo, thus making it your weapon of choice. And you're welcome to it. They're all good.

• "I couldn't help but immediately wish for more control in the combat, more options. Once I'd crested the gentle, rolling learning curve, I thought, "Ok, I get it. Now what can I do?" I wanted the training wheels to come off. I was sold on the idea of 3rd person melee combat and I wanted to roll up my sleeves and get into it, only there wasn't anything more into which I could get. I wanted to be able to execute different combos, such as a roll followed by an upward attack, or front-attack/back-attack combo, or a sustained spinning bull rush attack. The ability to control the swing arc, even if just categorically, would have amplified the combat variety tremendously, but this is a sticky UI issue."

  I mentioned the combos, right? Actually, what really makes BoD tick is the leveling system. Your avatar gains experience, levels up, and becomes not only better conditioned (more stamina) but more diversified as well. The different character combos and weapon combos are meted out based on your level. This keeps things fresh and interesting the whole way through the story.

• "Let me be clear, when I buy a game about melee viking combat, I don't want to spend my time dispensing abuse to large crab-like things. I play a melee viking game because I want to fight vikings, damn it!... All things being equal, Rune probably would've had what I wanted: more vikings. However, if the player fights vikings through the majority of the game, then the vikings have to behave differently. They would need different fighting styles, different skills. Naturally, the player would encounter untrained, poorly equipped vikings in the early stages, and progressively stronger, better-equipped, more tactical and cunning vikings as the game advances. Unfortunately, all things aren't equal, and AI is particularly not equal. In fact, it's really hard. So instead of committing themselves to developing a number of distinct AI profiles, Human Head did what your average game developer would do - take the path of least resistance."

  And here we get to the root of the matter. This is where BoD just kicks Rune in the cajones. If BoD and Rune were identical except for this one issue, BoD would still be ten times the game that Rune is. It does exactly what I described: you fight weapon-wielding bipeds throughout the whole game, progressing through untrained, poorly equipped grist in the early stages, through competent adversaries, through cunning, tactical, well-equipped men-of-arms. Throw in some really big, lumbering hulks who try to plant you like a tent stake, and you've got a game that serves up the goods. I cannot stress enough how much more enjoyable the combat is in BoD, when you combine your attack repertoire with the steadily sloping, believable AI, you get a game that makes you box instead of brawl. You cannot run and click your way through BoD. You have to learn how to best employ the weapons available to you, factored by your current abilities, and tailored to the environment in which you find yourself.

Now then, let's talk about the rendering problems for a second. The only thing keeping this game down is it's fragile rendering engine. I could not shake the hitches out of the performance on this game. Running on a P4 2.5GHz with a Radeon 9700 Pro, I should have been able to run this sucker at like a hojillion frames per second. Instead, I got nothing but a choppy framerate, and a black HUD that was nearly impossible to read. If I used the OpenGL renderer, the HUD text was visible, but the performance was even worse. It's too bad that BoD wasn't the game built with the Unreal engine, as that would have eliminated most of its faults. I think a lot of gamers, once encountering the technical issues that I did, would have chucked this game over their shoulder and moved on. I was so excited to finally get the melee game that I'd been lusting for, however, that I plowed through, tolerating performance that in hindsight was pretty intolerable. But who knows, maybe it was just something about the 3 machines that I tried it on. I have suspicions that it was associated with either XP or DX9, as the game likely wasn't developed on either.

I wish this had a happy ending. I wish I was sitting here eagerly awaiting the next installment in the series, anxious to enjoy a more robust game with even more refined gameplay. Instead, irony of ironies, Rebel Act Studios is out of business. And Human Head is, no doubt, slaving away on Rune 2. The fact remains, though, that BoD is a great 3D melee game, and everytime I upgrade my drivers I get out BoD to see if the technical issues have magically disappeared. Even if they never do, I've experienced the standard against which to measure future 3D melee games.