When I saw Bladed Fury I was curious since I like hack and slash games, even more if they’re 2D. Bladed Fury, developed by NEXT Studios, is set during the Warring States period of Ancient China. It tells a tale of revenge, war, and the injustice the protagonist, princess Ji Jian of Qi, has suffered. Her father, the Duke of Qi, is ill and on one fateful night she visits her father’s chamber and a monster appears. She defeats the monster, and an opposing clan, the Tians, use this as an opportunity to frame her for the Duke’s death and while she runs away her sister is left behind while the Tians govern from the shadows. And thus the tale of Bladed Fury begins.
Bladed Fury offers a battle system with some clever ideas that show the passion put into the project. In the beginning, you can use a basic combo just by pressing the attack button, which is Y for quick attacks and X for heavy attacks, a simple but effective control scheme. However, by pressing the up button while attacking, you can launch enemies to the air and you can continue the combo which normally ends with a powerful spiraling attack that brings enemies to the ground. There’s one really interesting mechanic that makes this game different from others in the genre. In most games in this genre, enemies take more damage when they’re knocked to the ground, however, in Bladed Fury they take less damage. However, if you use the heel crusher attack (down plus Y) they bounce from the floor and you can continue raining pain on your adversaries. While just using the basic attacks are limited, using all the tools at your disposal can lead to some creative combos, which is something I enjoyed about the game. For those of you who want to, you can just mash buttons mindlessly but I liked the option to be creative to see all the types of combos I could do in any given situation.
You want to defeat everything that moves since each defeated enemy drops a “soul” that is either yellow or green. You can use the yellow souls to upgrade your weapons and abilities, and green souls restore your health. During my playtime green souls seemed to be a rather rare find, so you are best off using the rejuvenation skill, which is limited to 3 uses in the beginning, though you get more when you upgrade the ability. Another cool mechanic that I liked is the Soul Sliver system, to explain it, think about the ‘Megaman’ series and Megaman obtaining special weapons after defeating robot masters. In Bladed Fury you obtain the “spirit” of powerful foes you defeat allowing you to use their respective special skill. These powerful skills have limited uses but you can restock them in the save lamps you encounter in each area. At the save point you can use your gained souls to improve your abilities and swap your equipped Soul Sliver skills. The boss encounters were fun and posed a good challenge, I like how unique each boss was and I’ll admit that I died a lot during each fight, so the challenge is there. I also like how generous the game is when you die, instead of respawning back to the latest save point, you respawn right before the area you died saving you from the annoyance of repeating some puzzles or areas infested with enemies. This is especially true for areas that have enemies with super armor, basically a character with a yellow outline around them, since they are kind of hard to defeat, though that’s only because your greatsword has a slow attack string so it’s better to use only the first hit of the combo or start with the launcher.
As you can see the game’s art style is stunning and well polished. I like how each stage transitions into something different as you play through the game. For example, in the first stage, you go through a soldier’s camp with nothing out of the ordinary, but as you advance through the map you end up in the middle of a battlefield and then enter the world of the dead through some portals in order to reach the boss at the end of the stage. My favorite stage was the brothel since it adds a puzzle element to the layout that I enjoyed a lot. The voice acting is good, though it should be noted that the voice acting is only in Chinese, that didn’t bother me because I think that it adds another layer of personality to the game. Even though I don’t speak Chinese I could feel the emotion put into the work, so it was nice to experience that while I played the game. There are some cutscenes in the game and I found some of them pretty funny, for example there was a cutscene at the beginning where two soldiers were talking among themselves and one of them said that he will use the name given by his mother since the previous Emperor didn’t allow it, then Ji casually strolls by and asks for the captain and they nonchalantly tell her where to go. Or another cutscene where a guard just wants to end his shift in peace, though a couple of moments later he dies by your hand, just little details like these enrich the experience in my opinion.
However, not everything is perfect, Bladed Fury isn’t the exception to that rule, during my playthrough I encountered several issues. Just some examples are shown in the screenshots above. In the first picture, as I defeated that enemy he sort of exploded but stayed frozen in place. In the second picture, after leaving that area and returning he was gone, which was annoying since I couldn’t interact with the lamp on the first picture until I did that. In the third, picture, as you can see, the enemy has no super armor gauge, but the enemy still has the super armor property, even when I hit him with the greatsword it didn’t do anything so I had to take the defeat and try again. The second time I fought him it didn’t happen but issues like that hinder the experience a lot. There were several times when enemies appeared suddenly, the game failed to register my inputs, or there were times when the dodge had no invincibility frames and I was hit when I wasn’t supposed to. However that being said, even with these issues I enjoyed my time with Bladed Fury, it just needs some patches to fix the issues to be 100% recommended.
Bottom Line, Bladed Fury has a good story and a gorgeous art style similar to what we’ve seen in games made by Vanillaware, in these two points NEXT Studios has nailed it. However, it still needs to address the issues it has. If you are a fan of platforming hack and slash games there is some fun to be had here. The game has potential but performance-wise the blade is a bit dull.
A Review code was provided for this review.
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch. Also Available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.