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X-Blades


Labeled With  xblades southpeak interactive xbox360
Written by Daniel Malito on Tuesday, March 03 2009

X-blades from Southpeak has the misfortune of being released around the same time as some major games. Street Fighter IV, LOTR: Conquest, and Skate 2 are just three games X-Blades has to compete with. The title does feature a scantily-clad tri-ponytail heroine, though, and her butt sticks out at all times. Is this enough to save the game? Let’s find out.

The storyline in X-Blades is your standard hack-n-slash fare. You take control of a ruthless, treasure-hunting bodacious babe who cares only for money and fame. Of course, you come across an artifact that is very valuable, but it also has a power that should not be fooled with. Being the way you are, you disregard all warnings and grab the artifact from its pedestal. When you do, you suddenly become enveloped and transported to a different world. You then have to right your way through different areas, learning about the power that is trapped inside you all the while. You meet with a few allies along the way, and eventually, you discover the true nature of the artifact and its power, and save the day.


The gameplay mechanics in X-blades is exactly what you would expect from a hack-n-slash. You have the standard melee attack, a heavy attack, and after a while, you get special magic abilities. You can purchase these abilities using the orbs you pick up when you defeat enemies. You can buy things like fireballs and earthquake attacks (you jump in the air in slo-mo, and hit the ground, shaking and damaging all the enemies in the area), which help you to defeat multiple bad guys, all at once. Unlike most beat-em-ups, X-Blades is set up in arena fashion. In other words, each time you defeat a group of enemies, the map you are on will remain clear until you leave the zone and return to it. When you move forward to the next area, you must defeat all the enemies in that particular zone, before you can continue on. The entire game works this way, in a zone-by-zone progression, and frequently backtracks through zones you have already completed. Fortunately, though, you do not have to re-kill all the enemies in a zone in order to pass through it. You only need to complete a zone once in order to unlock the exits for good. Some zones do have multiple exits, though, but those automatically unlock when you reach the right point in the storyline. The mechanics are very straightforward folks, just like it sounds. Zone in, kill everything with your blades and obtained powers, defeat a boss here and there, and then zone out to the next stage. Easy peasy.




The graphics in X-Blades are adequate for the game’s purposes. Taken in and of themselves, they are actually fairly impressive. The game itself is polygon-based, and for some reason, the cutscenes are even more beautifully cel-shaded. Why the developers chose to make the cutscenes more impressive than the actual game, I have no idea. The area where the graphics fall short is the environment. Every zone has almost nothing you can interact with, save a few statutes and pots to smash here and there. In today’s game market this is just about inexcusable. Add this to the tons of invisible walls that X-blades forces upon you and you have a recipe for mediocre graphics, at best. On top of this there is the free-rotating camera that you can control with the right stick. Unfortunately, the camera gets so out of wack at times during heavy fighting, that you will have a hard time seeing what you are doing. The camera also is hard to position correctly for anything you need to do above eye-level height. It is just annoying all around.

The sound in the game has two parts. There is the sound effects, and there is the soundtrack. The soundtrack is actually pretty decent, folks. The songs and music, which I assume are original, are well composed and fit the situations nicely. The sound effects, on the other hand, are pretty standard stuff. The sound engineers for X-blades might have simply pulled the effects from the standard effects database, and left them unedited. The voice overs, in case you were wondering, are pretty horrendous as well. Wait until you meet your first ally, you will think you are talking to a robot. He is human, I swear.

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