Leveling Down

Bladestorm is all about squad to squad combat – maybe the closest one can get to a successful hybrid action-RTS game.

The last time I reviewed a game was back in early February with The Orange Box. Since then, what the heck happened? I picked up both Devil May Cry 4 and Lost Odyssey in February, but I’ve only played a few hours of Devil May Cry 4 and I haven’t even started Lost Odyssey yet. Why is that? Bladestorm interrupted and apparently took over. This game, from Koei (the makers of the Dynasty Warriors games), grabbed hold of me for the last four weeks and didn’t let go until I was done. 65 hours later, I’m writing up this review and sad that the ride is over. Poorly reviewed by several magazines and neglecting by the general gaming public, this game was still a gem for me. Read on for why I disagree with the professional reviewers.

Intro
Bladestorm marks Koei’s first real next-gen game on the Xbox 360 and PS3 systems. Prior to that, their Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games spawned several sequels on the PS2 and Xbox systems, and some PS2 sequels were even released on the Xbox 360 (with the same PS2 graphics pretty much). Although many consider the series to be quite repetitive, it has a strong cult following not unlike the Madden series. I must admit that I am also a part of the cult that likes these Warriors games. To me, they successfully blend action, adventure, RPG, warfare, and item collecting all into one successful Asian historical package. The 360 games that were ported from the PS2 were weak graphically, so I was highly anticipating Bladestorm to see what a Koei game could look like when built from the ground up for the current systems.

Bladestorm is actually one of the worst selling games on the 360, having only sold 50,000 copies in the US and basically no copies in Japan. In contrast to that though, the PS3 version did much better – 50,000 copies sold in the US and 140,000 sold in Japan. While the 360 and PS3 version sales were identical in the US, it appears that PS3 is the Japanese Koei fan’s system. Bladestorm for the PS3 is the 10th most popular selling title for the PS3 in Japan, while only selling about 5000 copies on the 360 there.

In contrast to that, Dynasty Warriors 6 was just released in the US a couple weeks ago and back in November in Japan. In total, the 360 version of Dynasty Warriors 6 sold 40,000 copies in the US and 60,000 copies in Japan. 60,000 in Japan is quite a substantial number, as the highest selling 360 game in Japan, Blue Dragon, only sold about 200,000 copies. I’d say if your 360 game is a 100,000+ seller in Japan, it’s considered a successful 360 game. Compare that though, with the PS3 sales of Dynasty Warriors 6 – 20,000 copies sold in the US, but 400,000 copies sold in Japan. That’s just nuts – the number of PS3 copies solid in Japan is almost half a million!

So why did Bladestorm pretty much fail while the Dynasty Warriors series continues to sell strongly? Maybe it’s the name and characters that people have gotten so used to with the Dynasty Warriors games? Or is it the pride of playing historical Asian games as opposed to the European setting of Bladestorm? It could even be the different premise and game mechanics of the two games. There’s various theories, but I for one am sad that Bladestorm was so unsuccessful considering I liked it so much.

You can create eithr a male or female mercenary, but the options are pretty limited.

Storyline and Premise
Bladestorm is based on The Hundred Years’ War between England and France throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. In the game, you play as a user-created mercenary that gets random missions assigned to you from both the French and the English side. There are usually 4-5 missions provided at a time from both sides, and occasional “storyline” missions that have cutscenes and are required to be played in order to progress through the game.

As a mercenary working on missions for both the French and English side, it is not uncommon that in one battle you are fighting with Prince Edward to capture Paris from Joan of Arc, and then the next mission you take you’ll be hired by Joan of Arc to help you recapture Paris from the English. The missions themselves are quite random – there isn’t a persistent battlefield that moves back and forth based on which missions you take. However, you will often be presented with two missions that are related – i.e., backing the English or backing the French for a particular region.

Completing enough missions raises your Fame level, allowing you to take on higher difficulty missions and progress through the game. There are five Fame levels: 1-star through 5-star. Starting at 1-star Fame, your Fame bar fills up as you continue to complete missions. Missions assigned to you are pretty much ones that are only on difficulties specific to your Fame level. The only way to level up to the next Fame level is to fill up your current Fame bar and complete storyline missions that allow your Fame level to be raised to the next star.

The premise of the game itself relies on gaining glory as a mercenary through fulfilling contracts in the 100 Years’ War. As you continue to participate in battles and earn Fame, you eventually end up siding with the side that you completed the most contracts for and go on to win the game that way.

As a sword squad, the enemy cavalry has a definite advantage of you, and is highlighted with a triangle of purple/red. (Enemy squads that your squad has an advantage over will be highlighted with a green triangle.)

Gameplay Mechanics
Missions
The gameplay of Bladestorm is most similar to Koei’s Kessen series while retaining the “base capture” system of the Warriors games. Each mission usually involves defending certain towns/castles while taking over enemy towns/castles. Each town/castle has a number assigned to it, meaning that is the number of squads you need to kill to take over that town. Castles, for example, may have 10 squads defending it while a small town may only have 3 squads. This is often why it is a lot more difficult to take over a castle than a town.

You often have a set number of days to complete each mission, ranging from 2 days to an unlimited number (on story missions). Each day equals 10 minutes, and there have certainly been times where I have failed to complete a mission simply because I ran out of time.

Certain missions also have optional quests which reward you with extra Fame and gold. These optional quests occur during the missions themselves, but add a little something extra to the mission besides the usual “attack these towns and hold these towns” mission itself. The optional quests can be fetch quests where you need to go to a certain area of a map to collect something for the requester, escort quests where you need to escort a merchant or someone from one spot on the map to another while protecting them from bandits, and other quests like ensuring that you kill a certain enemy officer or coming in first on the point count by the end of a mission.

Squads
Unlike the Warriors games, you don’t get to pick a famous character to control – you are a mercenary commander that goes about the battlefield picking up specific squad groups to command. You can only pick one squad group to control, but you are able to switch to any other squad groups you see and the AI controls the unit groups you do not directly control. Each unit group can range from 5 to 30 troops at a time, so you’re basically only as strong as how many units you’re controlling. On each battlefield, both sides field various squad groups, which have specific strengths and weaknesses to other squad types. Thus, the game is all about “countering” certain squads with other squads.

Here are the 17 squad types in the game:
1. Short Sword
2. Rapier
3. Longsword
4. Spear
5. Pike
6. Cavalry
7. Halberd
8. Axe
9. Mace
10. Bow/Crossbow
11. Cavalry Archer
12. Camel
13. War Elephant
14. Chariot
15. Explosives
16. Magic
17. Engineer

To understand countering, take for example the Longsword class. The Longsword class is highly favorable against both the short sword and rapier classes, meaning if you are leading a longsword squad and attack a rapier squad of equal level, you will inflict 3x or 4x damage on the rapier class while the rapier will inflict a reduced amount of damage (maybe 1-2% damage) to the longsword class. Each squad type is generally strong against 5 other squad types, weak against 5 other squad types, and equal damage against the other 7. Of course, the level of your squad versus an enemy squad comes into consideration too. If your rapier level is 10 levels higher than a more “advantaged” longsword squad, you’ll still kill them all due to your level superiority.

If you ever forget what your squad type is strong/weak against, you can always check by hitting the Back button on the controller.

You are also able to buy up to 3 different squad types between missions. These squad types can be used anytime during a mission, immediately deploying the squad to the battlefield so you can control it. It is very useful to have 3 varied “back up squads” on missions because if you are at a disadvantage against enemy squads, one of the three squads you have on backup can be deployed to give your side the advantage.

Combat
Surprisingly, a majority of the fighting in Bladestorm is with the holding down of the Right Bumper. Holding the RB button down gives the squad you’re controlling the freedom to engage at will, while letting go of the RB button for your controlled squad will prevent the squad from attacking so they will merely follow you. The face buttons are generally the special moves of each squad type – for example a cavalry squad type may have one of their special move buttons as the Charge ability where you can use it to run over enemies if you are moving fast enough. The special moves themselves have bars that refill over time as soon as they are used.

There are also “flags” in the game, which you can carry three types of when you enter a battlefield. Flags are items that grant special effects on the battlefield. For example, one flag could increase the defense or offense of the squad you’re controlling for a certain period of time, another flag could resurrect dead units in your squad, and a third flag could lower the movement speed down of an enemy squad (useful against enemy cavalry). Flags can be bought from the merchant between missions or found in treasure chests in battles.

A good strategy with Bladestorm mode is using a squad type you have a lower level in since they become invincible and can thus kill at ease to level quickly.

Each enemy that you kill slowly fills your “super” bar. When the bar gets completely filled, your squad will enter “Bladestorm” mode, allowing for faster movement speed, increased damage, invincibility, and faster reload times on the skills. It’s awesome to be in Bladestorm mode.

Leveling
Besides the leveling of Fame as mentioned earlier, each squad type has its own experience level as well. Killing enough enemies with a particular squad will allow it to gain experience and level up. Leveling up grants the squad skill points to be distributed in how the squad type grows – raising its attack, defense, the reload time of its skills, how many units are in a squad when you call upon it, and how powerful each of the squad’s particular skills is.

Each mission in the game has a level of difficulty for it, ranging from 1 star to perhaps 15 stars. On 1 star difficulty, friendly and enemy squads are basically level 1-5, but any squads you control are your own level for that squad. As you continue to play through the game and go up in Fame, the difficulty level of the missions you can take on are raised, allowing you to eventually take on level 50+ squads (or for the insane last special mission, level 99 squads). Taking on higher level squads obviously earns your squad experience quicker, but taking on any squads maybe six levels higher than your squad will be tough.

One of the “enjoyable” aspects of the leveling for me was trying to level each squad type enough so they were all leveling at a constant rate. This had a Pokemon gameplay feel for me, as when I played Pokemon I often leveled several Pokemon types at once, so I could use whichever one I wanted when I needed an advantage against a particular Pokemon type. Of course, there is also my brother’s “Super Squirtle” approach that works in Bladestorm here as well (for Pokemon, he only used Squirtle and leveled it up so much the Squirtle pretty much plowed through any enemy, whether it was supposed to be weak against it or not, simply because its level was so high). Some players just use the cavalry class and make it their main default class because not only does it have the ability to trample over almost any foot soldier in the game, it’s the fastest unit in the game so you can move around the battle field quickly with it.

Items
Items also play a pretty big part in the game and can be found on both the battlefield and purchased from the merchant between missions. There are several item types – defensive equipment for your mercenary character, offensive equipment for your squads, flags, artwork, and special items. I mentioned flags earlier but here are the other item types available:

Finding defensive equipment, such as various armors, helmets, etc. and equipping them on your character will give boosts to particular attack types for your character. For example, a helmet may give +5 pointed weapons and +3 blunt weapons. Equipping it will allow your individual character to do this bonus damage when controlling the corresponding squad type. The bonuses do not affect the squads you control though.

To increase the damage that your squads do, you need to keep finding/buying them new offensive gear and equipping them with it. Better gear is often sold by the merchant when you are halfway through your current Fame level and after you successfully move up a level of Fame. New squad weapons allow any squad you are controlling to do increased damage with their weapons.

Most artwork in the game is sold just for money, and you come across this artwork frequently in battle. Some artwork, however, grants special benefits when held in your inventory such as increased gold drops, increased chance of rare items dropping, etc.

Finally, the special items in the game are items that grant special benefits similar to certain artwork. These special items are often only found through random drops in battle and missions associated with them. For example, finding all the broken components of the Aegis shield will prompt a blacksmith to put together the Aegis shield for you.

You can check the map at any time to see which locations you need to secure (marked with crossed swords on the map) as well as where enemy and friendly officers are.

Achievement System
The Achievements in Bladestorm are perhaps on the simple side, as they revolve around getting the books to all 17 of the unit types in the game and beating the game. In order to command and level up any unit type, you must first find the book for it, which generally all randomly drop after you reach a certain Fame level. For example, while you can get the long swords book at 1 star Fame, the elephant book doesn’t drop until you hit 4 star Fame. However, those that have played this game know that it takes a lengthy amount of time to get all 1000 points, since the last two books, the Book of Explosives and the Book of Engineering cannot be gotten until practically after you max out your Fame at 5 stars and have sunk at least 50 or so hours into the game already.

Therefore, while the Achievements themselves seem simple to anyone that hasn’t played the game, those that have played the game or have gotten all of the Achievements themselves know that this game takes time. I myself think the Achievements were decent since they certainly helped in having me play 65 hours with this game, but it would have been nicer to have more interesting Achievements based on skill-related tasks.

There could have been Achievements related to getting all of the secret special weapons and items in the game, maxing out your squad levels, defeating enemy generals at a much higher level than your own, etc. Such Achievements would have easily had me playing this game over 100 hours!

Friendly and enemy generals will often have something to say before or after you engage them.

Final Thoughts
I had some hopes for Bladestorm when I bought it several months ago, but it wasn’t until I actually played it recently that I became addicted to it. I can’t really think of another recent game where I’ve sank this many hours into without really feeling like it was a chore. In fact, many nights when I was playing this game I got annoyed whenever it was time to go to sleep. It has a very addicting “just another mission” thing going for it. When I unlocked the last Achievement, I was actually very sad that my time with the game was over. While there were many more missions I could take on, more special items to find, and more end-game gear to equip my squads with, I just have to move on since my game queue is not getting any smaller.

I give the game a B+. Bladestorm has surprisingly become one of my favorite Xbox 360 games. It successfully blends a strategic level of decision-making not unlike many popular Euro style board games, with a well presented full-scale war game. The addictiveness of finding items, leveling up, a beautiful graphics engine, an amazing soundtrack, and its unique, yet intuitive “squad based” combat system make the game a delight to play for action/RPG/warfare fans like myself. The Achievements could have been  planned out a little better and the missions presented in a more logical way to be less repetitive, but I still loved it. The game is not for everyone though – and I can’t give it higher than a B+ considering the niche genre it is in. Definitely recommended for anyone that loves RTS and action games – rarely does a game successfully combine both like Bladestorm.

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