Blade & Sword

So there is this game I really enjoy that is often overlooked. It is called Blade & Sword.

It is often called a Diablo clone, and yes, it does look and play very similarly, but it's different enough to be its own thing.

The story summed up is that you are in ancient China, but a lot of bad things happen and humanity is struggling to survive while the world is now inhabited by hordes of demons nad you must defeat them.

It's pretty basic, the game isn't too impressive in its other aspects as well, but it sure is fun to play. Atmosphere in this game is top notch: artstyle is truly nice to look at and the soundtrack is amazing. The gameplay is a bit different from Diablo games. To make it simple imagine Diablo, but take away the loot system and replace it with fighting game-like combo system. That's some crazy stuff! Of course you can upgrade your equipment by inserting gems into your demon slaying tools, but the only items you can get are potions, throwable weapons and aforementioned gems.

There are three classes in the game:

1) Warrior - the slowest of the three, but the strongest and toughest one. He has the least active skills, but is the only one who has passive skill branch.

2) Samurai - the guy in the middle. A bit faster than Warrior, but also weaker.

3) Heroine - the token women of the three. She is the fastest and most fragile of the three. She is great for making long combos since she can not only use her dual knives to kill demons, but is also great at unarmed martial arts and uses her legs very fast. That provides her with not one, but two default attacks.

The game itself is divided into 3 chapters. Quests are pretty standart: kill that guy, talk with that dude and so on... The combat is the most important aspect of it. It is sometimes a bit unresponsive, yet still satisfying. Boss battles can get really difficult later on in the game, so it's a true challange to complete the game on any difficulty above Easy. Also when you complete the game Nightmare difficulty is unlocked and I do not know if anyone has beat it to this day.

There is also a sequel to this game called Blade & Sword: Ancient legend, but I haven't played though it since the only version I can find is in Chinese (I believe there is a Russian release). That games is pretty much the same, but from what I played it felt a bit worse. It runs on the same engine, most of the sprites, enemies and playable characters are the same. The only new additions are new maps/story, some new enemies and one new playable character - a monk who knows martial arts and some magical ranged attacks.

I believe a MMO version of the game was released later, but I didn't even want to try it since it was too different: it lost its dark atmosphere and looked like any generic asian MMORPG.

I have put a full playthough and full soundtrack of the game on Youtube if anyone's interested.