Great Game, Bad Name.
Gameloft continues to wow us with the release of Blades of Fury for the iPhone. I’ll start off by saying I have been enjoying fighting games only recently. I have always been a first person fanatic but playing with Tekken: Dark Resurrection for the Sony PSP, I have successfully been converted to a button smashing martial arts nut (ooooh! title cameo!) Blades of Fury interested me completely when I first saw it’s teaser (especially how they explicitly showed Elwyn’s assets, now THAT interested me) Blades of Fury is the first fighting game I have seen in the iPhone platform, and surely after experiencing Modern Combat: Sandstorm I was expecting so much from it.
Let’s say it out loud now before anything else: truthfully, Blades of Fury is a FRIGGIN’ RIP-OFF! (Sigh, we’ve seen this kind of stuff before, it’s called; Soul Calibur) BUT again, it manages to exhibit the iPhone’s mysterious power (ooooh mysterious!).
Blades of Fury is basically and surprisingly what you’d normally expect from a typical fighting game; less story, more action. Its story is very different from the past fighting games that I’ve played where all the characters are destined to fight amongst each other in a big tournament. Blades of Fury, however, revolves around the story of a Mystical Magic Armor the wields it’s wearer invincible. This armor is given to a character named Arthur (yeah I bet it’s another cameo of King Arthur) and different characters challenge Arthur to a duel in order to take claim of the suit. So basically you’ll now assume that the stories of the different characters are encounter-based and they would fight anyone who get’s in their way, typical but good enough.
Love the art.
Graphics are astonishing (wow new adjective people!!) 3-D model rendering is honestly impressive. Polygons barely show in the fighting part itself. Textures are beautiful and movement is bewilderingly (new adjective again!!) smooth. What I found breath-taking were the different arena environments, from either roasting your marshmallow in hell or flying high up the skies on a giant (moving, and I really mean moving in real time) dragon! What I found amazing was the arena called ‘Babylon’ as it really showed a beautiful lake with a gigantic waterfall at the back, and during the fighting, it manages to smoothly process the waterfalls and it looks incredibly stunning (I think this is also the reason why I keep losing fights in this arena). In-game art is beautifully painted especially the different characters. The interface is wonderful and fast with just a few options to choose before kicking some butt. Speaking of butts, I believe it is also important to discuss CHICK RENDERING as it is always the pinnacle of any fighting game.
Would you look at that? Isn't it amazing? (The environment I mean)
WHAT IS CHICK RENDERING?CHICK RENDERING first and foremost is the effectiveness of a virtual girl to possess lusciousness and babe-lisciousness. Bad polygon rendering or texture filling can greatly deteriorate the over-all seductiveness of a half-naked martial arts master chick with the exception of old games (Yeah Sony Playstation 1 Lara Croft, I was referring to you hot honey-bun) Blades of Fury manages to maintain the integrity of the women’s wondrous grooves and trenches giving them, surprisingly an attractive lusciousness which we, as professional gamers, can continually appreciate (yeah that’s the way to say it!). Light physics aren’t too obvious in the game but it seems that an innovative creation of character textures amazingly produces an illusion of depth and size, making it more possible for movement processing to be faster, and making it more possible for us to see these wonderful battle vixens wrestle each other in what seems like their night outfits. For an iPhone game, I personally would like to shake the hands of the visual developers for creating wonderfully attractive characters that really ARE the very spirit of these kinds of games. (Though I haven’t really confirmed if Boob-physics engines are present) Cheers Gameloft, cheers!
NOW LOOK AT THAT. Bravo Gameloft, bravo.
The most important thing to discuss now are the controls of the game, which personally, I think, manages to effectively stay in the level of sufficiently responsive virtual fighting. The virtual button layout proves Gameloft as a company who understands the difficulties of on-screen buttons and manages to successfully create a ‘cooperative’ button system. The directional pad is effectively situated on the left side of the screen. The D-pad is effective since it needs only one touch to move in any of the eight directions compared to your usual combination of two sides to move towards it’s middle direction (example: east and south combined would be, say it with me everybody; south-east) Maybe it’s good to rethink the typical console controller with the effectiveness of this eight-button directional pad. What surprised me the most was the very good button placing for the actions. The right edge of the screen is utilized with 2 circles for low and high sword slashes respectively, and one button for magic attacks. A small button is situated in the very small place between the 2 slash buttons and surprisingly it seems effective as a ‘guard’ button. For some reason, action controls seem to be very accurate, I rarely press buttons I don’t intend to press and it seems that character responsiveness is very sensitive to my command input. The only thing I didn’t like was crouching and jumping which required me to hold the guard button while I press up or down, but over all, it seems to work well Gameloft did it again with its control system, way to go Gameloft.
"YOU'RE UGLY FACE SAYS IT ALL!" - The game's got great one-liners.
The game play is innovative enough to sacrifice some parts of a typical fighting game but still effectively communicates the authenticity of the game genre. Blades of Fury took out the “kicking button” of characters and instead embedded the kicking ability inside certain combos (yeah Gameloft, I would abhors you if your chicks were dumb enough to not use their legs- uhm I mean in combat, he he). The typical increasing ‘power gauge’ when hit or when you successfully hit your opponent is there giving you the ability to perform different levels of magic attacks depending on the length of ‘charge’ they do while holding the magic button. Combos are easy to do and for an iPhone game, each character has a good number of combos to perform strategically. Characters have different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, but somehow, moves are recycled by other characters. The usual ‘unlock new characters and costumes (usually just a cheesy way of saying color change)’ tasks are still implemented in the game if you play certain characters in the story mode. Arcade and Survival mode is included in the game and opponent difficulty can be set. Honesty I think opponents are more challenging as difficulty increases, it seems that Gameloft has created a batch of intelligent AI’s, good for people who want to really get themselves immersed in the game. Oh yeah, another surprise is that armor CAN be broken, he he, watcha gonna do with THAT knowledge? He he.
Well I'd like to break HER armor, well, at least what's left of it.
Blades of Fury is a wonderful rip-off of Soul Calibur from other consoles. It’s amazing to see a fighting game working flawlessly on the iPhone and it is also somehow surprisingly replayable at times. Battle graphics are wonderful especially the collision physics and character renderings. If you want to see what the iPhone can do, or you want a fairly intense iPhone fighting game with astoundingly smooth and stunning graphics without caring about originality (I hope you make your own original fighting game concept SOON Gameloft) then Blades of Fury is for you.
Blades of Fury (you had to give it THAT title) gets “3 and a half” half-naked video game chicks
Out of five.
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