Bleak Sword Review

Bleak Sword’s graphics seem bad. actually bad. I’m addressing this right out the gate because this first notion has most likely kept many players from generous the game a shot. The logo is factually just a stick figure with a sword and shield, for heaven’s sake!

Yes, the low-colour sprites are hypothetical to look retro, and they do look retro. There’s not anything wrong with a retro look, but indie games have been liability the retro look for so long that it’s no longer an innovation. Plus, when you attempt to seem as retro as Bleak Sword is going for, the graphics look bad first and retro second.

It’s an indignity that this is the first impression that one and all will get of Bleak Sword since below the bare-bones external is some of the best action gameplay that’s ever been probable for mobile platforms.

The plot is about as bog typical as RPG plots get — there’s an evil eternal king, three magic stones, and predict hero, so go kill the bad things. It’s all told with an intellect of apprehension and gravitas that sense a bit out of place at first. The slideshow cinematic that put up the plot tells its typical tale of disloyalty and woe using stick figures,

and it’s hard to get spend in the fate of a kingdom when your first feeling of a place is that it’s haggard by a five-year-old.

Yet the game pulls off unbelievable tricky as it ferry players during its numerous different putrefying, monster-filled environments: it begins to feel like it earns that gravitas. Its combat incarcerates a sense of subsequent against all odds by the skin of your teeth, and it revolves out that the art style is in fact fairly efficient once you look past the cave-painting-sequel look of the player character.

There’s a sprinkle of atmospheric lighting and ecological effects that hammer home the cheerlessness that the game’s title none-so-subtly points at, and the easy art has just enough detail to hint at the grotesqueness of the creatures while send-off enough to the thoughts to let the players’ minds fill in the gaps.

Add on top of this all a few eerily fluid animations, and players could find themselves suppose the story if they hadn’t already forgotten about it by the time they reach the end of the starting forest.

The boss fights make the best use of this style, with enormous, unapproachable sprites that dwarf the player and suggest a sense of fear as you mentally try to figure out what exactly it is that’s hunting you about the battlefield and trying to shatter you like a pancake.

What’s annoying is that a game doesn’t need retro art to achieve this effect. I get that indie game developers like more8bit might not have the budget to spring for high-fidelity character designs, but I can’t shake the feeling that if the game didn’t star a pixilated stick figure knight, it’d have happened to a huge hit that people basically wound's be able to stop talking about.

The game recognizes how to mix things up in a way that keeps its central mechanic from rising stale. Every few stages it brings out new enemy types that all need to move toward with different strategies to avoid taking damage, and they every one hit hard enough to make players want to shun their attacks.

The surroundings also change regularly, with each place contributing its own hazards that affect both the player and foes similarly, giving players the chance to be clever in how they beat their foes.

The game presents both a one-handed and two-handed control scheme, but it actually shouldn’t have worried about that. The one-handed organize scheme features a clever and instinctive way to mix moving, dodging, parrying and aggressive into a series of easy-to-remember single-finger inputs.

The two-handed scheme, for now, is just the same controls, but half only work on the left side of the screen, and the other half work on the right. There are things that the game could do better — like a less-linear stage sequence, a story that’s more than just an addition, and a few bug fixes spring to mind.

But it’s rare to find a mobile game that embraces its stage as well as Bleak Sword.