User Reviews (1 - 11 of 33)

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SLOW AND BORING

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 6
Date: March 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Thats pretty much all i can say

Beautiful...and uncontrollable!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: April 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User

With four characters to choose from, and many levels to explore, Blade of Darkness is graphically one of the best games out right now, with lighting effect (the torch shadows are AMAZING), interactive environments, and water reflections. Also, it's got good sound, and everything sounds like "real life." BUT...it falls flat on its face when it comes to controlling your character. In some levels, there is a lot of catwalks and/or platforms to jump onto, and having an extremely tight control makes it so the character changes direction with the slightest touch of the mouse or keyboard, which makes precise movements all but impossible. Plus, if your foot misses a ledge by 0.2 pixels, you will slip and fall to your death.

In Blade of Darkness, you melee opponents with swords, axes, etc. This is the heart of the game, and the idea is great and the attacks look great, but it WILL frustrate you at some point in the game. Here are some of the biggest annoyances: If you push the attack button too many times, you'll just stand there swinging at air while the opponent steps to the side and slashes your back. If you move your mouse too fast, your character will NOT TURN (with an Intellimouse Explorer, at least). If you dodge too many times, you'll actually go back in FRONT of your opponent. There are combo swings and attacks, but those are not worth the aggravation because of the precise timing required to pull them off, and even if you can, the opponents block the attacks anyway. If you swing when you're next to or even near a wall, you will hit the wall and the rest of the swing does no damage, which can be especially annoying in narrow corridors! AND, sometimes, even when you are out of the opponent's range or swing, it will STILL HIT YOU. Must be a shockwave or something! Another thing is that at later levels, the opponents will have rediculously high amounts of hit points, and it takes a VERY LONG TIME to wear them down. Of course, when they do 400 damage to you with each swing, and you have only around 2,300 hit points, it can get especially frustrating. I very nearly uninstalled the game when I kept getting killed because this ONE opponent I was fighting apparently had an extendable sword, because no matter how much I dodge or blocked, it always hit me.

For graphics and sound, I give this game five stars, but the extremely frustrating controls earn it a one star for that part of the game, so overall, I give Blade of Darkness three stars.

Die by the Sword.. No :(. prt 1

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 27, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Many years ago I played a cool Demo called Die by the Sword. It had an awesome interface where your mouse would control your right arm. Which mean in order to swing your sword you would have to swing the mouse. It was very accurate. I remeber gettign caught up in a leg snare and having to swing it up towards the ceiling to cut the rope. Well I few times I was off and cut my own leg off.

About 3 years ago I bought this game because it was rumoured to be similiar to Die By the Sword. But I returned the game because my computer then was a bit to slow and I didn't like the frame rate for the level of graphics I wanted. But I bult a new computer and asked for the game for Xmas.

So now the game runs smooth and has very nice graphics. A little dated but very crisp. No complaints with the sound either. Mood music is very affective.

But my dissapointment is that the mouse interface is removed and its down by pressing a direction key and attack. Sad.
Nonethless the battles are still won by skill not button mashing, which saves this game some stars.

A huge variety of weapons to use makes it very entertaining. Plus as people said before, the enviroment is very interactive. Beat someone up with a chair, an arm, anything you can pick up.

A careless overlook though is when you swing a club it temporary turns into a sword through the swing.. Well that sucks.. It doesn't cut like a sword though, thank goodness.

Anyway after I get more fight experience and become more skilled in the art of combat I will write the second part and see if my disapointment for the mouse interface is overcome. Don't get my wrong you can still accurately cut off an arm or leg, but never as accurate as the mouse control.

Anyway for now its a 3. Stay tooned for part 2.

live by the sword......

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: April 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Blade of Darkness looked set to achieve new heights in the fantasy/action genre. I must say I'm a little dissapointed. Although it excels in various departments,( the lighting and use of shaddows is quite frankly exceptional, and adds to the very creepy and atmospheric feel of the game) it is let down in some critical areas. Despite the importance of great graphics, it is gameplay and originality which makes a great game and Blade of Darkness has nothing we haven't seen in a dozen other action/adventure games. Climbing up walls and jumping over ledges may have been revolutionary before a certain Ms Croft arrived on the scene, but now it just seems dated. In fairness maybe I'm being a little harsh on the game, as I can't honestly say I didn't enjoy hacking the enemy into numerous pieces and duelling against the very good AI. I was just expecting the first true classic action game of the century and what I got was another fairly decent one to add to my collection.

Gorgeous graphics, suspect gameplay

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: July 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Played on 1Gig P3 with Rage ATI 128 graphics. Windows 2000 Pro.

Someone spent a lot of time working on the architectural details because this game is simply gorgeous. The only other game that comes close is Half-life with Blue-shift graphic upgrades. If I was grading on graphics and sound effects alone I'd give this five stars.

But you have to play it too and there is a long list of problems here. Firstly, this game suffers from the same problem that all 3rd person hack'n'slay games do -- the camera ends up in the wrong place so you can't see guys that are whacking you. Give me 1st person views any day.

There's also the 'unique' physics which are cool at first but soon it gets very frustrating having your opponent walk right through you and your character ends up staring at the wall ignoring your commands to turn around (rather like my dog, really). Meanwhile, you're getting whacked again.

The difficulty level varies wildly too, and some areas are hip deep in potions when you're topped up while other areas clearly have too many heavies without a chance to recover. I don't understand why there's such strict limitations on what you can carry (1 power potion, 2 life, 2 1000hp, etc) Why not just allow you to carry, say, 8 potions of any kind? I also had problems dropping stuff which is very frustrating when it stops you picking something up. At one point I had to drink a potion before I could pick up a gem.

There are cheats available, but they are very flakey. For example, they only work when you start a new level, and once you load a saved game, they don't work any more. I guess whines about cheats aren't really valid, but you cannot finish the game without them.

All the monsters are bipedal. I wish there had been a dragon, or slime monster or something a little more interesting. Actually, the monsters were the weakest graphically too. Some weapons with range would have been nice, the bow was pretty boring compared to some of the weapons in Quake II or Half-Life. How about a Holy Handgrenade? (The number of thy counting shall be...)

I think four stars may be a little generous, but the graphics, especially water and fire, were outstanding.

Lacking the final polish

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: December 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game has great potential and lives up to it in many areas. The atmosphere, the graphics, the lighting and the shadows, and the sounds are simply gorgeous most of the time. The enemy damage model is also impressive, gotta love hacking and slashing your enemies to bits and pieces (some kind of a stabbing attack might have been nice maybe).

However, the game lacks in areas of playability. For starters, the main menu is one of the most awkward ones I have ever seen, with only the arrow keys working, and a lengthy delay (with a tiring "KA-CHUNK!" sound) between each option you can cycle through - if you have 20 options to cycle through you need patience. Even when you start the game for the first time and load a saved game it asks, "Are you sure?". Had the developers had time to polish their product, these problems would be gone.

And then there are the controls. While I don't mind a few extra control keys, the problem lies in the character's controllability. The character must finish every animation before allowed to continue (including all moves, not just the fighting ones), which means there are constant small delays with the controls. While this is realistic in a way, players want instant feedback or they get frustrated. This gets especially problematic with the tight jump puzzles. The few instant deaths scattered around, and the slowness (and awkwardness) of the game saves and loads reduce the fun factor.

The game is very difficult. I probably shouldn't have started playing with Naglfar the Dwarf, but even after becoming comfortable with the controls, the enemies got the better of me most of the time. You are occasionally faced with insanely difficult battles that you must attempt several times before you succeed (which is not very fun with the slow game loading), and even then you'll end up almost killed and may not be given a chance to recover. Another balance factor thing that could have been fixed in the final stage of development. I admit I ended up cheating a little and giving my character a couple extra levels of experience to get comfortably challenged.

But so far I've had great fun regardless. There aren't many games of this kind around. It's kind of like an interactive Conan movie. In its own genre, this game excels.

omy

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: July 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

"Blade of Darkness" is like a good steak; after the first bite, you just gotta have more. A good swipe of your sword; Claymore?,and your adversary totters, neck spurting type O, while his recently attached noggin goes rolling down the gutter, must be experienced. Very immersive. Nice special effects also, but takes a good 3D card, so be warned you may have to run this with most of the goodies turned off. Still, you won't be disappointed; it's one of those games that stands out and will have you up half the night. En Guard!

A Fascinating Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: March 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Firstly i wanna say that this game includes lots of blood,gore and violence scenes.I love like these games.When i played this games demo version,i was exciting.Cause of this games scenes,effects and real sword combat scenes have been coming so beliavable.You should pay attention shadow plays in this game.But this game recall die by the sword.In this game u have a 2 choice for play.First one is normal adventure alternative and the second one is multi-player alternative.When u choose the second part u r starting to play in arena mode.This games heros,scenes,effects are so wonderful.You have alots of combos,and weapons in game.But this game is very hard.So i didint give 5 star for this game.On the other hand this game is excellent in every respect.

Best game so far this year

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: March 08, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I can't think of a better feature in a combat game than to be able to ... up your .. while it's lying on the ground. Limbs, blood, and heads fly in every direction. Fantastic. In contrast to the previous reviewer, however, I was going to suggest that the game be a little more difficult.

not perfect, but great.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: April 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Well, to begin, I must say I play more console games than PC games, so my experience in PC games is not really big.

As most others agree, the visuals are real good, shadows, monsters, everything is pretty good. The control is good, not very good or great, just good. It has a lock-on target similar to the Z-targeting Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time , which I find a very good feature. the problems I find, are that, for one, you can't walk sideways unless you are using the lock-on on some enemy. The steps the character takes are a to long, making you fall into pit's quite often, an analog joystick would really help, in my opinion. Sometimes, I don't know why it happens, maybe it's my fault, when you press back, the character either tries to atack or does some weird movement, and when there are a fewbadies in front, you get REALLY hurt. Other than that, the game is very good, I don't regret getting it and if you like exciting and challenging melee combat, this game is for you.

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