Blueblood Arena

This review is for 2 reasons. To give constructive feedback and to tell people with nobody else to play with, like me, what they are getting. TLDR it's just training mode because the AI opponents are terrible. Most of my playtime was spent in training mode. I do not regret my purchase. the game is clearly still early in development and I'm looking forward to see how it turns out. Does it deserve a negative review? Probably not, but tough love baby! If you don't care about what I have to say you can skip to the end. The good, the characters are actually all unique and play differently from each other. I also found them all fun to play. The roster is small but all the characters are good quality. As others have said, the combo system is great. You have complete freedom to do whatever you want after hit (within the rules of the game, such as 1 wall/ground bounce). If you feel like combos go on too long you can even reduce combo length in the settings menu. That's pretty cool. Unfortunately, it might have come at the cost of the rest of the gameplay. I guess I'll put unlockable color palettes here, there are a lot of references to other media and fighting games. It's nice. The neutral, training mode. It's very basic, you get a standing dummy that you can set to block or not as well as choose meter amounts and what screen position you restart in. You can also see frame data, damage scaling and the other actually useful stuff. It gets the job done. You can find a lot of fun in messing around with different combos and seeing what works the best for what you want your character to do. The bad can start with meter gain. It's awful. You can get up to 3 bars of meter. You need 1 for a universal invincible reversal and 3 for your super. Meter carries over between rounds and I have won both rounds without getting enough meter to even be able to use my super. Just...how? I can understand not wanting people to spam reversals but not being able to build the meter for a super until the end of the game, if you are even able to, sucks. Also only having 2 things to spend meter on is a bit underwhelming, especially if meter is going to take this long to get. It might as well just be a reversal tax in this state. Arcade mode and by extension VS CPU are also awful. The AI hates to block and they behave in easy to recognize patterns that you can abuse. Penny is hilarious, she wants to stay at a certain range from you so if you just hold crouch she just kinda walks back and forth in place, jumping sometimes until she gets bored and actually attacks. If you do run into the rare CPU that blocks just do a basic frame trap. It might block one attack, but surely not twice. Just loop the same situation over and over and you always win, it's just training mode with extra steps. I ran through arcade a few times and some VS CPU matches to see win quotes and I've had enough of them. I was originally going to put lack of defensive options in the bad section but to be honest, these CPU goofballs made me forget I even had to play defense in this game. The armored move you can dash cancel if it blocks an attack is kinda fun though, so I guess defense can be neutral. I didn't try online because currently my internet is very bad and I respect other people enough to not force them into a laggy mess. I pressed the multiplayer option in the menu though to check it out and after picking my character, nothing happened. I'm guessing it just puts you into a queue until it finds someone else? I have no idea. I'm not mentioning character balance because I am not a psychic that knows how the developers want each character to function. In conclusion, is the game actually bad? Not really, but clearly all the focus was put into the combo system and the rest was neglected. Which makes sense. Wanting to get the meat of the game, the combos, correct is important. I bet this game would be pretty good with a real person to play with, but sadly that is a luxury I do not have. I do not want to play Arcade or VS CPU ever again, the opponents are really that bad. I will probably keep playing training mode sometimes because I always find training modes to be relaxing. I will gladly update this review in the future as more updates come out,