Welcome to our review of the western alternative to Bayonetta and Devil May Cry – Blades of Time. We played the port of this Playstation 3 & Xbox 360 game which was originally released in 2012. Did it withstand the test of time? Let’s find out.
Lara-Netta?
What do you get when you put Lara Croft in the body of Bayonetta? Probably something like Ayumi, the gorgeous gun and sword-wielding treasure hunter. In Blades of Time, she sets out on a journey to an ancient island in search of new adventures. While rich in bounty, the island is also filled with the magic of Chaos, being at the same time home to bloodthirsty monsters. Since, why not.
When I booted up the game, it really felt like I was back in the PlayStation 3 era. The whole game breathes a vibe of the early 2010s, and there is nothing wrong with that. I missed out on a lot of these games. I played mostly Nintendo through my years of gaming (and PC). So I really like it when they port games like Blades of Time, or Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy to the Nintendo Switch. However, they have to make sure the game runs. And Blades of Time did not run well.
Blades of Time – Test of time?
But before we go into too many details, let’s review the rest of the game. Blades of Time looks good, the visuals are really well done and hold up to today’s standards. No, it’s not in the same league as God of War or the new Darksiders game, but it’s not pixelated or anything. I did experience some frame drops while playing the game in handheld mode, but nothing that made the game unplayable. The story is a little .. clunky? You are basically thrown into this storyline in which Ayumi gains special powers by resonating with a shady cloud-figure (I’m not going to give too many details here). This grants her the ability to rewind time, Prince of Persia style. This comes in handy since treasure hunting often leads to overcoming traps, which are, well, deadly.
The combat style in Blades of Time is mainly martial arts, comparable to the Bayonetta games. There are a total of 40 different combo attacks, as well as spells of different magic schools will help Ayumi to defeat all the enemies that stand in her way. If you don’t find that enough to choose from, you can also fire at enemies with a rifle (which is really hard to control on the Switch). The game even offers Co-op and PvP in a special Outbreak mode, which I could not test due to a bug I encountered.
Bug-caution:
I don’t know if my version of the game is the only one that encountered this bug, but it was rather game breaking. Every time I entered a certain area in the game, the game would crash in the Nintendo style of the way – an error has occurred.. Even reinstalling the game to see if that would fix it, did not fix it. I could not progress further than this point, even in a new save game this was an impossible feat. I personally hope that the developers at Gaijin Distribution patch this out of the game, since it makes it literally impossible to play. So consider this before buying the game, and maybe even consider buying Bayonetta instead, since it offers much more then Blades of Time.
