Blade Chimera Review (ross.irving)
I wanted to like this game, and I had moments where I felt like things were going to ramp up, only to feel that pit in my stomach that what I was playing was too familiar an experience.
So the story is pretty standard, none of the reveals should surprise anyone too much. I’m sure many of you will get where it’s heading as soon as you reach the point where the original demo ended.
Nothing too demanding about the combat, either, you have a LOT of tools – a roll and air dash with almost no cooldown whatsoever, the ability to attack in eight directions with most weapons, auto-aiming guns for your secondary weapon. While you’ll sometimes be put in a bad spot with status ailments where multiple enemies can kill you in seconds, for the most part this game walks on the easy side, even the bosses. Many of the enemies move slowly, remain in place, and then give a long windup before they attack, which can usually be negated with your spirit sword, Lux. The game does ramp up near the end with some of the final bosses, and they even tried to get some nice gimmicks in, especially the secret final boss, which took me quite a few attempts to figure out, I’ll admit. But other than that, the skills given came dangerously close to trivializing both combat and navigation.
Speaking of navigation, the map design. I’ve noticed a bad trend in the adventure game genre that was in this game, too, where the bulk of the map design are a row of enemies in a room with no other hazards or gimmicks. In platformers you have less movement options and less health and maybe even a chance to die instantly, but you still have to fight enemies and deal with gimmicks all at the same time. And yet in adventure games, you get more tools with many of the layers of its platforming ancestry stripped away for the sake of combat that isn’t all that in-depth. Why? Something’s gotta give and players will only tolerate this for so much longer before they recognize the crust forming on this genre and turn away from these games.
It’s also important that I bring up the warp, too. On the one hand, sure, it makes for no backtracking. On the other hand, the way rooms become available to warp in works in the strangest way. It’s not enough to scrape the space that belongs to that room, it will remain red. You need to then go somewhere else to explore another new room, and only then will the previous room be able to be warped into. At first I found that clever since I did it into an elevator shaft to get a collectable puzzle piece (they open doors that give you good weapons and items) that you couldn’t get any other way. But then when I got the high jump I ended up warping to the highest point I could, scraping into a new room, going to find another room, and then repeating that maybe two or three times just to get to the very top of this huge vertical area you couldn’t climb, just to get a sword, or another puzzle piece. I wonder if it’s possible for a player to accidentally softlock themselves out of accessing those last crucial pieces if they explore the map without realizing this.
The system with Lux, where you can use her to render platforms usable or to control certain objects, drops off near the end of the game, where you’ll soon ignore these to dash over pits or high jump over walls. These parts could be engaging and demanding of my reflexes, but unfortunately didn’t make up for half of the game’s map design being hallways. For the most part it works okay, it’s based on proximity, but there were times when I was scrambling to attack an enemy only to accidentally activate a gimmick instead, even in boss fights, so that was an issue I had.
Side quests are very weak, with the only real reward for most of them being to get more puzzle pieces and fight a few optional bosses that you can easily destroy with Lux’s skill attacks. You’ll have more money than you know what to do with.
I think this game shares more in common with past adventure games than it’s able to distinguish itself from those. It’s executed well, it had an interesting gimmick, and it was a polished experience, but I don’t see much replay value in it. It actually feels too long to encourage runs, and there isn’t enough variety in how the weapons work to make a second playthrough feel worth it, either. I'm recommending this title, but not without a few major caveats that have less to do with the game and more with recognition of larger underlying issues in "metroidvanias".