Blade Assault

[i]Could have been a 10 out of 10; Ended Up Mid-Tier[/i] Blade Assault gets a lot of the basics right. Music, graphics, art and theming are all really great. Moreover, it makes a good attempt at keeping things fresh with solid enemy variety, loads of character/weapon/items/ability choices, a ton of barrels and objects to satisfyingly destroy for potential loot and numerous distinctly different environments to traverse. This alone goes a long way to creating the addicting game play loop enticing the player to go for 1 more run to advance your progression. However, not all aspects are as refined as the aforementioned ones. Starting with the combat you have a barebones enemy behavior (bosses aside) for the vast majority of them. The pathing is very linear, simplistic and extremely predictable. There are a few flying enemies that abuse the vertical space and can even go off screen at times. When numerous enemies overlap each other in a grouping it becomes extremely difficult to decipher what the individual combat intentions are. In a similar vane, there is some sprite hitbox weirdness where the player can get "inside" a bosses sprite and completely avoid a range attack. Next we have the economy and upgrade systems. The persistent currency (currency that you keep after a failed run) has mixed uses for both persistent and inter-run upgrades. This makes for scenarios where if you have depleted this resource you are essentially doing a "farming run" to refill your reserves. The inter-run upgrades should have required non-persistent currency that you collect during that specific run only, maintaining some control over a runs balance. Moreover, there are currency exchange terminals in the early part of the game with some extremely questionable rates that only magnify this issue. On the upgrade progression side things are generally better but a few of the core upgrade routes are not made very clear to the player and are overly convoluted. Furthermore, power balance between different starting weapon upgrade routes is all over the map. I stated in the highlights that the game has a lot of items to choose from. On the surface that is great, but unfortunately too many of them are very low impact; borderline filler. There are some that will passively regen a tiny amount of HP/MP even out of combat. This creates a weird incentive to stand around and do nothing for a while after a room clear. I wish they would have done a better job here giving more meaningful thought and purpose to many of the items. Lastly, there are a few glaring technical issues. One of the most prominent being item information text boxes. If you go anywhere near one of these pickups while combat is active a large text box is going to cover a lot of the combat area obscuring whatever is going on. Another annoyance is the controller support. Its there but you have to jump through some hoops to get it working correctly. In game recognition does not bind the all the buttons correctly on a dualshock 4. It can be solved by using steam input and then disabling/unplugging the controller prior to loading the game; then reconnecting at the title screen; after about 10 seconds it should be active. Overall, although I liked the game there are still too many areas that needed more improvement for me to say that this is an excellent product. It's still definitely worth playing but be aware of the noted drawbacks.