Blade Assault - A regular Roguelike. No more, no less.

It is always difficult to start from scratch, a little easier to use someone else's experience, but it also requires experience. South Korean company SuneatTeam has no ambition to occupy, not experienced guys in their first job took on a difficult to develop genre - roguelite. About the sources of inspiration Koreans did not spread, but Blade Assault is similar to Risk of Rain and Dead Cells at the same time. But is the genre of two-dimensional platformer-roguelike as simple as it seemed in the infancy of the idea?

Roguelite Genre Compilation

The first thing that comes to mind when we look at Blade Assault is the word "compilation," but with one exception... ...Compilation is the presentation of the results of someone else's research without independently processing the sources. In the case of Blade Assault, the processing did take place. But let's not get ahead of ourselves and start from the beginning: Blade Assault is a classic platformer-roguelike, but packed with all sorts of mechanics. The classic concept with races, permanent death of the protagonist and meta-progression bloated almost to the scale of MMORPG with a breakdown of levels. All of this is convenient to talk about in the context of the retelling of the story...

The player, not really bothering with the backstory, is introduced to the protagonist - a gruff little Kill. He is imprisoned, but not for long. A drone emerges from the ventilation system and frees the protagonist. Kill is driven only by revenge. He wants to pay back whoever imprisoned him. But the game wouldn't have made it to the review if Kill had succeeded in the first minutes of gameplay... Defeating the guards, Kill fights his way into the office of the main creep named Fanuz. But to defeat the antagonist in a fair fight is prevented by his secretary, a certain Elektra. The fight with Elektra and Kill ends with the latter's instant defeat. The protagonist is thrown into a cyber slum from a height of five kilometers. Upon landing, Kill does not die, but finds himself in an unknown room, comes out and meets his saviors. By the way, the starting location is the hub, where each run begins. Each of the inhabitants of the hub is responsible for only one function: one is responsible for meta-progression:

The other is for pumping the weapon itself:
P.S. The same Gods from Hades. Who got it - he got it.

By communicating with the third character, you will unlock new heroes. For currency, improve the reputation of the NPCs in the passages between rooms:

By the way, playable characters are not scattered over DLC, which would be very helpful for the developer. The first four characters are free in the wine, penny version of the game - SuneatTeam, my respect. The characters, even though they look completely different, are not so different in practice, only in skills, about which later ...
...But what's particularly nice is that the hub is lovingly hand-drawn in pixel-art, not glued as a menu.

Everything in the game seems to be upgraded: skills, weapons, characteristics, item dropout probabilities, use of transition rooms between battles, etc., etc. Even at the build stage, Blade Assault makes it clear that it is not a single-player platformer. Speaking of the combat system...

Casual Dead Cells?

Until now we were only talking about the statics, but when it comes to the combat system, this is where Dead Cells comes to mind: lightning combos of common melee and ranged attacks, active special moves, jerk, and double jump. The combat system is permanently chained to the player's chosen character, but the same character can be pumped up in completely different ways. Like the rest of the roguelite, the basic pumping in Blade Assault is rather random, which affects the play style as well; consequently, it is not limited to spamming a single button.

Weapons can be charged with three elements: flame, cold, and electric. The player will be guided by the choice of element. For example, there is a passive skill that freezes enemies during a jerk, which means that the protagonist must rush from side to side, like a meteor, to avoid being surrounded. It is reasonable to add increased damage to stunned opponents to the freeze, and the stun can be not only in the elements. Usually builds on the synergy of two or three passive abilities. Passive bonuses also give items from the chests encountered in the levels. If you've played roguelite before, you'll understand everything without any explanation. If not - Blade Assault will be a small test and an introduction to the genre. Without understanding the mechanics of the role-playing system you'll have to spend some time to learn them, and this game has a bit of a problem with that...

...And the thing is that Blade Assault suffers from a widespread rogulite disease: sometimes the item descriptions are vaguely worded and the properties are hard to comprehend. In addition, in the description of one item I found an amusing phrase: "With some probability...". With some? How much is that?

Characteristics of the main character is not less than in the same MMORPG: all sorts of skills, talents, ascents, gifts, but only in profile.

And what, besides features, are MMORPGs full of? That's right. MMORPGs are full of resources and consumables. In Blade Assault there are five of them, some have multiple uses. What are we talking about when there is even an exchange in the levels?

A large number of characteristics and resources somewhat raise the threshold of entry, but somehow mysteriously combined with slasher and not overpower your head. Opponents here are just as well: not so simple, they also have their own passive and active abilities, energy shields and a set of prepared attacking moves. In text form it may seem like I'm describing some kind of Diablo, but when it all happens directly in the game, the screen gets muddy:

It's doubly sad that you have to navigate quickly in this mess. Sometimes there are so many opponents on the screen that you don't have time to consider all the variables and you die accidentally. Triple sad that the basic mechanics of the game do not combine with the mess on the screen. As long as there are enemies in the location, the search fill rate goes up. A new level of search - the enemies get stronger: more and more special opponents appear on the map, and the old ones may have an unpleasant feature, for example, to leave a mine behind after death. The mechanics with the gradual strengthening of enemies as you pass through is copied from Risk of Rain.

A fly in the ointment

In addition to the non-intuitive tinsel on the screen, Blade Assault has enough non-critical, but very unpleasant problems. For example, the keyboard and mouse controls do not work correctly - some interface elements do not respond to the mouse. Poking around in the interface is often necessary, so that unfinished control is like straight from the early access, it is annoying. From the early access as if moved and balance. The line in the settings with the proposal to increase the damage by 50% and reduce the incoming damage by 50% in easy mode is a sign that the developer is too lazy to balance their game.

But the most unfortunate thing about Blade Assault is the low replayability. The game's root mechanics work so that the player doesn't need to sharpen the synergies between items and come up with builds in order to win regularly. Whichever character you choose, if you have the passive skills pumped up, you already have 50% of the build. This is bad, because the character at the beginning of the race and at the end almost does not change. That is, trying out all the characters in two variants, in this game is pointless. Starkly lacking is randomness: legendary items do not flip the game, and levels change only the position of platforms. You can go on and on about how Blade Assault is ok, you can go on and on about the balance, but just take my word for it: there is a reason why I called Blade Assault a passable roguelite. There's about 15 hours of content here, and then the same kind of stuffiness begins...

Is Blade Assault worth buying?

It depends on what platform you play on. On Steam, Blade Assault often costs less than $2 with a huge discount of -75%. On PC, Blade Assault's ROI is high. On consoles, Blade Assault is not on GamePass or PS Plus, and it's not worth buying this game separately from your subscription. And in general Blade Assault - is 10-12 hours of gameplay in a mediocre roguelite, the impressions after which weathered from the memory after the final credits. Played - fine, did not play - well, fine.