Insanity's Blade for the PC
Previous days' entries can be read HERE.
Previous days' entries can be read HERE.
Looking into this game before I started playing, I saw on HowLongToBeat.com that the expected completion time was less than 3 hours. I’m not the sort of person to complain about short games, in fact I rather enjoy short focused experience, often more than a long meandering one.
So, eyes open, I plugged in the fantasy realm of Insanity’s Blade, expecting a brief, retro, hack ‘n’ slash with all the eighties trimmings.
The story of Insanity’s Blade is that of Thurston, vengeful warrior and purveyor of seaside amusements, as he sets out to rescue his wife and son from hell. He’s accompanied on this quest by a dwarf called token player 2 avatar Finn.
It all starts off rather well. The chunky retro style graphics are nicely drawn and authentically animated, the gratuitous violence of the grapple moves is entertaining, and the music adds nicely to the grim atmosphere.
There’s some fun ideas too. ‘Corpse Surfing’ downhill sections of the level keeps the tempo up and looks very cool to boot, ripping the arms from enemies to use as weapons is gruesomely entertaining, and a side scrolling shooter level in which you ride on undead Dragons beat Game of Thrones to the punch by a couple of years. Unfortunately, the game seems to run out of this kind of idea before it even reaches half way.
Mid boss battles are the first thing to suffer, as their defeat very quickly becomes a matter of standing next to them hammering fire. And it is ‘fire’, a very short way into the game you gain the ability to throw knives, and this in turn can quickly be upgraded (via the in-game shop) to be a three or five way spread. This renders the lovingly crafted grapple moves almost completely useless and makes the game feel like some kind of Ghouls and Ghosts/Contra hybrid - without coming close to the qualities of either.
This is perhaps the biggest issue the game has. It wears it’s influences so brazenly on it’s sleeve that it’s hard not to compare. As well as Ghouls and Ghosts and Contra there are similarities to Splatterhouse, Rygar, Black Tiger, and even Castlevania IV to name just a few - and each and every homage paid makes you wish you were playing the game being mimicked, rather than this lacklustre pastiche.
It doesn’t help that the game seems overly concerned with it’s dull, unoriginal, and very poorly constructed story. Each level begins and ends with a lengthy text crawl, the only purpose of which is to clumsily link the different themes of each stage, with unintentionally hilarious references to the player 2 character that bring to mind ‘Poochy’, and the unceremonious return to his home planet.
By halfway the game has already started reusing enemy designs, and soon after that it begins to recycle bosses. At one point you fight the exact same boss at the end of three concurrent stages. Death becomes ever cheaper as the game wears on too.
You level up throughout the game simply by slaughtering the massed undead. The first way the game tries to balance out how OP you’re becoming is to throw endless waves of enemies at you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t balance the item drop rate so by simply wading into the hoards hammering fire you will occasionally, even often, be rewarded with a health vial that negates any threat.
The next thing it does is to introduce enemies that spawn from nowhere, with no warning, often right on top of you - the most frustrating of which will be forever remembered in my personal lexicon of shitty game design as ‘That Fucking Wraith Thing’.
Nevertheless, I slogged on, more out of sheer bloody-mindedness that I wouldn’t be bested by this crass nonsense than any desire to see the endgame.
Frustratingly, the final battle has the seeds of a great idea, whereby you alternate between some vertical platforming and fighting the big bad in three phases. Unfortunately, this too is bodged, with the platform providing more cheap deaths and the boss battle providing no challenge at all.
‘Style over substance’ is a lazy and over-used dismissal, and it’s often thrown at games that are nothing of the sort.
It is, however, completely accurate in the case of Insanity’s Blade.
With the gameplay so far below average it’s left to the graphics to be the strong suite, and they can be very nice, particularly in the early stages. But even in terms of the visual design there are issues.
Chief among them are several instances of ‘faux-mode7’, often a pet peeve of mine with this kind of new-retro game. Top tip: replicating a visual effect that was cutting edge 25 years ago on a PC 1000 times more powerful is not impressive.
It’s pretty clear that the developers started with a clear plan to pay homage to adventure platformers of yesteryear but quickly ran out of ideas. It’s incredibly telling that, at one point, only a short way into a stage, the game glitched skipped me straight to the end of level text crawl, and I was happy about it.
Ultimately, the worst thing about Insanity’s Blade is just how average it is; damned by the fact that not only is it not good enough to be worth 3 hours of your time, but, ironically, if it was a worse game it would probably be more interesting.
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