Here’s a riddle: What do you get when you cross beautiful art and satisfying RPG elements with mindless button mashing and questionable animation? If you said “Third Blade” by Korean mobile developer Com2US, then you probably read the title. Seriously, it could have been a thousand other games.
That said, Third Blade’s an interesting take on the genre and a pretty good ride considering the platform. It looks beautiful in stills, but the enemy sprites don’t have all that many animation frames. The story is your typical guy-out-to-save-girl fare. You are, well, some guy. I honestly don’t remember his name. It’s not that it matters. He’s out to save some girl who was half-swallowed by some worm. Really, it doesn’t matter. It’s mindless and, were it not for the screen grabs I took early on still sitting in my Camera Roll, I’d likely forgotten that it was even there at all.
So, you go out with one of three weapon types, though you’ll pretty much only use the one-handed sword, and go from stage to stage doing the exact same thing. You fight the enemy, just as you did in Final Fight all those years ago, though with cleaner graphics. Oh, but the enemies are less varied.
There are three different variations of the same monster. I had just killed a fourth.
Seriously, I can list them all. Worm, zombie, zombie girl, crawly clawed thing, fat orc, wannabe Metroid floating thing, knife-throwing locust with a tail whip. Now, they do try to trick you into thinking these are different. Like the oversaturdated 90′s comic book industry, they come in way too many variations of the same thing. You can have small, regular, big, huge, transparent, palette-swaps, aurora, and boss varieties. Aside from the more-likely-to-drop-runes aurora variety, there isn’t much of a difference. Bigger ones have a longer attack range, but their moves are identical and often the same power as smaller ones. Oh, and they’re all pretty much the same enemy aside from the locusts and crawly clawed thing, which have ranged attacks and quicker movement, respectively.
You have a few moves at your disposal. There’s slash, counter-attack slash, power-restoring slash, jumping slash and… you get the point. You’ll slash left as you push a pile of monsters backwards and then slash the opposite direction when they inevitably spawn behind you. After a while, a portal or two open on the right, and you go to another area where you do the exact same thing.
As you slash, slash, slash, you’ll gain a combo-meter that can level up. Get hit and you lose some of the meter. Keep filling it up and you can gain up to three buffs. It dwindles over time, but it’s still pretty easy to keep at full at all times. You can also roll to avoid getting hit, but it’s pretty ineffective for the most part, and you will often attack in the wrong direction. Virtual controls probably aren’t doing the game a favor here.
Boss battles are, for the most part, the only time the game presents any of the advertised “Adrenaline Rush.” Bosses each have a gimmick spell and, of course, high power. Some will kill you in as few as two hits, unless I’m just doing something wrong. There are other enemies on screen during most boss fights, but they are combo-meter fodder.
To increase your power, you’ll need to collect gold and runes. You can purchase a rune for 500 gold. They drop during fights, but they’re pretty rare. If you want to improve your skills, you’ll need to collect runes. Otherwise, you can improve your character through a variety of different ways, from simple weapon and armor upgrades to stat upgrades. It’s actually the deepest part of the game. It’s a shame, then, that you’ll either need to grind to gain gold and runes or make an in-app purchase of gold to speed the game up.
The bunny ears mean she's hoppy to see you. I'm not proud of that one...
There are four different game modes aside from the story mode that you unlock in the game. Each one has global boards and differs from the others. Aside from the first mode, which is kind of the endurance-survival-horde mode, I wouldn’t expect to be playing them much. You receive less gold in these modes than you do by simply playing stages over, and there is no chance to collect runes.
It may seem like I’m down on the game, and I am, but it’s not all bad. Again, it looks great, aside from the lack of enemy inbetweens, and though I haven’t mentioned it, the soundtrack and sound effects are appropriately epic. It sounds kind of like something Nobou Uematsu would do with the Black Mages, though there aren’t enough tracks. Additionally, the hand-drawn backgrounds look terrific. Additionally, every stage should take you far less than ten minutes to complete, meaning Third Blade is great in short bursts.
Overall, Third Blade is a good game with numerous flaws. With a little more enemy and gameplay variety and a lot more inspiration, it could have been a great game. As is, though, it was a short title (~5 hours) that I liked enough to play through in a very short time, but couldn’t recommend to anyone aside from people who really enjoy mindless hack-and-slashes.
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Platform: iOS
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