FLASH OF THE BLADE X is another "boomer shooter", this one with a "ninja" theme, making this, effectively, a ripoff of Daikatana that is somehow so much worse than Daikatana was. It seems to be a hallmark of the developer to make boomer shooters without much shooting, preferring instead to rely on melee weapons, punishingly bad difficulty, with very few, poorly placed pickups, and otherwise somewhat sloppy level design to make a frustrating and repetitive experience, as opposed to the fun and interesting experiences you'd get from games like Hexen or Duke Nuke'm 3D.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets with crap 2D retro pixel "art" textures on them, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. I know in this case it's deliberate, but at the same time, making games look bad on purpose is a disservice to gamers and the gaming industry. This very poor quality visual style is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, worse, it doesn't authentically recreate the 1990's vibe the developer is hoping people will accept instead of doing their job properly, and that's just another reason to avoid it.
These flaws make this game fall far short of the professional standards we expect from a modern PC release.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 3 players[/b], which is a clear indication nobody was interested in the game at all, for obvious reasons.
This costs $3, which is how much the developer should be paying people to play this and for compensation.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
