Recent reviews by Ashes

Note: I played through the whole game before actually getting in Steam, I don't even know why I bought it, compulsive spending I guess.

Overall Impressions

I expected this game to be better, first of all, there are a lot of issues are which are making the experience less enjoyable. I'll start with gameplay, the controls themselves are good, but the overall platforming feels slow and clunky, things easily blend in with the background and make it harder to see where you need to jump to.

Animations aren't so good when platforming too which makes the game feel even more awkward while jumping around. Sometimes you have to stop and carefully place your character right above an object (which takes time and zombies are almost always following you) in order to jump and trigger a grabbing animation.

The shooting is kinda fun, despite the clunky aiming and platforming, the so-called game "secrets" are simply obvious, but the atmosphere is really good.

Puzzles are boring and generic (pull this here to climb over there), the game difficulty and feeling of despair you get when you see the world easily become obsolete when the game saves every five seconds and gives you full health every time you re-spawn.

Soundtrack isn't anything mind blowing, but it isn't bad either. The graphics are gorgeous though, but the game lacks simple options to control them (I'll talk more about that later). The story is your generic zombie apocalypse kind of thing, the characters are barely likeable and voice acting is terrible.

The cutscenes look like they are scaled down to 720p, you can clearly see some artifacts here and there and are not really enjoyable, seems like they saved money on rendering actual cutscenes and just went for the comic slide-show type of narration here.

Port

The port is where it gets really bad, the game is locked at 30 FPS, the menu has barely any video settings at all, FPS drop in certain places for no reason and the game sometimes freezes for a couple of seconds and unfreezes on its own. Optimization is really bad overall.

Controls are fully rebindable, so we have that going for us. There is an audio settings menu with basic options as well, which is always nice. The game also supports a gamepad (It would be strange if it didn't, considering it's an Xbox port).

I can't believe they couldn't make a decent PC port out of a Platfromer/Shooter kind of game.

Quick Version:

- Lack of Basic Graphics Options
- Bad Optimization
- 30FPS Cap
- Awkward Platforming
- Clunky Mechanics
- Bad Voice Acting
- Generic Characters and Story

+ Great Atmosphere
+ Beautiful Graphics
+ Shooting Things Is Somewhat Fun
+ Fully Rebindable Controls
+ Gamepad Support

Would I recommend this game?..uhm not really, I expected more and even if you like the game itself the port will definitely ruin your experience to some degree.

This is one of the prime examples of F2P done the WRONG way.

A different take on fighting games, which I really enjoyed. I would recommend it to people with the patience to learn and master the mechanics.

For my full review follow the link:
http://thexknights.wordpress.com/2014/05/09/blade-symphony-review/

Game crashes all the time, every 5-10 mins for no reason.

Best Platformer Ever Made™