Bloodforge

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Beautiful art style and interesting celtic mythology along with a sheer brutal protagonist aptly named "Crom". The main critique of this game is that it is brutally difficult ala demons souls. I rather enjoy a challenging game due to the extra gratification of conquering it however there were some poor strategic choices made by developers and the 1200mp asking price is a tad steep considering Microsoft already pillages you for everything you got (and people still think xbox live gold is a better deal than PS plus, PS plus actually gives you something for your $....like a TON of free games and exclusive discounts) but i digress, more games need to add a little edgy style and interesting mythology like bloodforge has (yes Halo i'm talkin to you for one, with your bland and sterile environment). The game is not perfect but worth a look if you like beautiful art style and celtic **** and boiling rivers of blood.

Bloodforge is a XBLA game that was released on April 25,2012. After the success of other XBLA games like FEZ, Trials Evo, TWD Ep.1, American Nightmare, and I am Alive (debated). It seemed that XBLA games were headed in the right direction with its game breaking standards. Bloodforge IMO holds true to the success to the popularity of XBLA games. For 1200ms points (15.00 dollars) you get a hack & slash game that feels like Ninja Gaiden Black (to me) with a Conan the Barbarian feel to it. The graphics are nice. It was drawn to resemble the cinematic effect that you saw in the movie 300. Remember I said resemble. Gameplay was fluid and the action was non-stop. I experienced no frame-rate issues while in some pretty intense battles with multiple enemies on the screen. I have no complaints in regards to the sounds of this game. Everything sounded great while in battle or while traversing to you next **** game does a great job at making you feel like a complete BAD ASS! The difficulty it was scored the highest points for me. I found no option to increase the difficulty level before you start playing. With ALL my games I always jack the difficulty level all the way up. Having said that, I find that whatever the default difficult level is it will most def challenge the most ardent gamer! Now I cant give a review w/o telling some things that I didn't like. The controls and camera dont work together like they should. I found myself having to readjust the camera to suit my battle performance more than I would like while fighting 8+ enemies. The checkpoint/save system was very weak. In a game like this where you could spend 20mins fighting normal enemies and mid-level bosses at the same time, dying is a effing drag! It would have been cool to be able to save-as-you-go type of feature. Those are the things that I didn't like, and as you can see the issues I had with the game are neither game breaking or game ruining. Sure there are AAA titles that do the same thing Bloodforge does and does it better but, if you wanted those games you wouldn't be reading this review. Now would you?

Right, so I haven't really played the full game yet, but I can already tell just from playing the demo that this game isn't that great. For one, you character slides whenever you move him. While moving in one direction, it's not noticeable, but trying to change his direction makes his slip-slide all over the place. Combat feels incredibly stiff. His animations essentially look the same, so it doesn't really feel intense. Light attacks feel stiff and Heavy attacks don't really feel like they have an power behind them, it's pretty much a slower Light attack. The graphics aren't too bad, but for a later Xbox Arcade game, they could've done a bit better. Story, it's a bit interesting from as much as I've seen. If anything, I say that's probably the only reason I'd want to buy this game, just so I can know the story. Then again, I could just look up let's play videos, if any exist with this game. All I can say is, if you want a bloody hack-n-slash style of game, I'd recommend Darksiders.

This game is meant to be a XBLA counterpart of great AAA retail games. But length and graphics are not the one things that have been scratched down. BlodForge has a very frustating Camera, bad controls and so common gameplay macanisms.