Ah, yes, Bladestorm, the ginger step-child born of enabling Omega Force to once again make something that isn’t a Warriors game (it’s worth remembering they once did also do fighting games and RPGs, among others), yet isn’t one of Koei historical turn based grand strategy titles like Nobunaga’s Ambition or Uncharted Waters, but more like a real-time Kessen.
This time around we’re taking a break from the Three Kingdoms, Sengoku era Japan or Asian history in general, as we’re going back to the middle ages, yes, but Europe this once, in the 14th and 15th centhury, to revisit the events of the Hundred Years War between France and England.
And of course this comes with a big, gynormic “loosely based on” sticker, because it’s a videogame, it’s a videogame based on historic events by the Dynasty Warriors developer, so you already know historical accuracy isn’t gonna be on the table as the main course, or barely at all, because who gotta have historical figures like Gilles Rais and John Talbot interact, and also give them very flamboyant anime style design… why the fuck not?
The plot is told mostly in cutscenes (that develop the various character arcs and of course take a lot of liberties in terms of characterization for the historical figures represented, designs aside), as your player customized character is just another dude in a mercenary band that happens to be involved in the conflict at hand and participate in both “trivial” and important battles of the war, with the option to side with either faction and also save Joanne D’Arc, if you want.
This was true for the original PS3/360/PC release of the game back in 2007, but we’re tackling the expanded port for PS4/X-Box One/Steam, Bladestorm: Nightmare, the PS4 version specifically (as apparently the PC port of this that’s on Steam is shit on a stick, and being an older Koei PC port, yeap, i believe it), which adds some features but mostly a new fantasy campaign that gives this release its new subtitle, Nightmare, which we will tackle later.
I’ve compared it to Kessen, but it’s not quite that, as we have a RTS-action hybrid creature that feels like someone took Dynasty Warriors but wanted to make it a strategy title about moving about armies more than being a lone superpowered warriors mowing down entire armies alone in a jiffy, while still having emphasis on capturing bases, done by defeating the officer than eventually appears after damaging the territory enough, etc.
It’s a peculiar breed, the only thing that i could even think to compare it too is Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders, but it’s more like Pikmin than Starcraft crossed with Dynasty Warriors, as it does have that distinctive Warriors interface, style and “feel” to it, but it doesn’t play like a hack n slash, with you controlling the leader character (i made Carl from ATHF) but he mostly directs the various units under his banner so you can conquer bases, by holding the trigger to launch your equipped unit or use a variety of unit based special abilities, including boosts to attack or defense.
The idea is that the unit types have a “rock paper scissors” dynamic between each others, as also indicated by the various icons, and so it encourages to build more varied squads as you can.
Bases are linked together, Empires spin-offs style, and some bases are also “citadel bases”, meaning instead of a generic officer guarding them, you’ll have to fight a more tough, mini-boss style foe with AOE attacks and armour gauges, made more easier to break/chip away with the titular “Bladestorm”, a.k.a a powered up temporary state your troops can enter by chaining combos and the likes, when you have a full bar of it available, that is.
You can also summon an ally officer (that you can also swith control to, when available) to a specific base, but that is a feature i honestly mostly forgot was even available, since the ally IA – in typical Warriors fashion – can be both amazing at surviving some situations while also being idiots.
Not that it will matter too much since if you know what you’re doing, you’ll fairly quickly find how to exploit the systems and basically steamroll the opposition, making most of the mission difficulty rating meaningless, since sometimes it’s far “harder” to do missions with a low difficulty star rating, while some of the high difficulty rating can be a jiffy because you can abuse the systems and bumrush the specific bases required to be captured in order to win.
There are ultra difficult 10 stars rating missions that unlock in the post game, but still, you don’t play Bladestorm if you wanna be challenged, since its so exploitable and i assume made so to have you revel in swift and utter domination of the enemies troops, after the initial grind required to get some exp, units and extra commander slots.
Also, curiosly, battles are played in 10 minutes long sessions that the game counts as “days”, when they end its nightfall and the armies just stop, its time to go to the pub for everyone, i guess.
It’s an odd mixture of RTS and arcade sensibilities, with some depth but also a wildly unbalanced mess of a game, for example while the many troops variety have their own strenght or weakness against specific others (and you always check that by pressing the Start button), there’s no denying that cavalry unit have an advantage, since speed is of the essence, the maps are big and even when you recruit more officers/general you can swap between/play as during the battles, you’ll still have to move about as fast as you can to control the battlefield and keep control of the bases/territories.
Myself i eventually stopped bothering with any other troop when i unlocked the camel riders, aside from using some of the “summon ready” single-use recruit units you can instantly deploy by equipping them in the load out, alongside the pennant load outs for various boosts or effects, going from more speed to luring the enemy battallions to where you are in order to help keep control of some bases, keep fighting, keep the combo going, fueling the Bladestorm boost, and so on.
But still, some troops are just more effective than others, and even with their resistances or weaknesses you just need to invest some SP points into improving the troops or the books (for example you need to obtain a certain book before you can equip a certain class/unit) that improve their attack, levels, mastery, health, etc.
This is a double edged sword because you’ll do a lot of grind anyway.. but you’ll have to do a lot of grind anyway due to how the reputation/fame system works and how it dictates the pace at which new story missions are unlocked… or taken away if you don’t do them as soon as they appear, meaning you’ll have to do other generic or minor missions in order to have the story important ones reappear in the list.
Playing into the mercenary angle, NOT sticking to a faction and just alternating between fighting for France and England for every battle does make the story missions show up faster… wish the game explained that to me. It didn’t.
The fame system it’s a bit more obtuse than it looks: sure, since you’re a mercenary, that means you can take a mission on England side one battle and France’s the next, fine (just remember this applies during gameplay, so double check which side are you on, since the color coding in red doesn’t indicate enemies and blue doesn’t indicate allies), and you accrue fame as you battle, eventually unlocking a story mission with cutscenes about important battles and improving your reputation/fame, which unlocks more items, units, and so on.
Even with the weird “ranking” system evaluating officers performance at every day of battle with bonus exp and stuff, that might still require you to fuck about or do some other missions that show up in the available pool/list, so grind is basically a constant, and there’s not much in terms of mission variety, objectives might vary a bit, but basically boil down to the same loop of conquering/defending bases, with some specific target bases to either capture or defend, sometimes to held for more days, but still, it’s pretty repetitive. I mean HUGELY repetitive.
Kinda to be expected from an Omega Force game, yes, but the setup doesn’t help since it forces you to battle over a handful of maps over and over again, maps that aren’t that much distinguished between each other, and the map design rarely take advantage of the stuff like rams, ballistas, war elephant and auxiliary siege weapons (or stuff like various types of bases), that are often just kinda there in Warriors games but expecially in a game like these should be capitalized upon… and are still really not here as well, it’s baffling.
The exception often being the story missions that do ramp up the difficulty, offer some variation or more scripted events that makes use of rams and stuff (or force you to focus on some specific bases), they are better than the generic ones, but not that much better, to be honest, so you’d wished they took less grind to unlock in the first place, or that there was another story progression system in place instead of “the play & pray” grindfest just to hopefully unlock the next story bit.
I do recommend keeping multiple saves, since some missions can unlocked by meeting certain conditions and playing various events siding with one faction instead of the other, heck, at certain battles the game itself will tell you “there’s no turning back” and encourages making a second save so you can reload the previous one and see where picking the other sides leads or what missions unlocks.
Also, as a side niggle, it’s weird how the fame system and the battle rating basically fight each other, since you get more fame by spending time capturing extra bases and defeating extra enemies, BUT this goes against the scoring-rating that encourages you blazing through battles by going straight for the main or required base to capture and ignoring everything else.
I will admit there is some fun undeniable fun to the gameplay loop, there is, it’s undeniably supersatisfactory to mow down armies while commanding other armies in a RTS-action hybrid style, as you take over France with suspect insta-summonable ninjas or by moving about some monstrosity you or other players made, since like in DW 8 Empires, you have a CAW officer edit/customazible avatar systems, but can also encounter the ones made by other players, even in story missions, like when i had to face the fearsome OC officer of “Tiny Tina Turner”.
It’s good for a laugh, as i said before i did make a Carl from ATHF/Larry Miller hybrid character, with some time i’m sure you can make some funny bootleg Piccolos or something like that.
Still doesn’t change that it feels like Omega Force crafted a fun if messy gameplay loop that is simply not backed up by a balanced or varied offer in terms of map design and objectives, making for an almost immediatly repetitive experience that will still take 30 something hours… to not even properly finish, for this new review i fired up the game again and spent more time finishing up the original main campaign, the Hundred Year’s War one, but the issues still remain, making for a flawed yet fun experience, if taken in small bursts and not all once, due to the sheer repetitivity.
Thankfully, the new content does address some of these issues, with the newly made campaign that gives this expanded port its subtitle, Nightmare, which is also available from the get go.
This is a straight up fantasy scenario with monsters, where Joan D’Arc goes full “demon mistress of the leodark” (it’s a Tecmo Koei title alright), becoming evil and summoning hordes of monsters to do her evil bidding, forcing both France and England to halt their war and unite against a far worse crisis, starting at Gascony, nothing really worth committing to memory.
As i mentioned, its already immensely less of a slog, since it does away with that awful progression system, so you go from chapter to chapter in a linear fashion without having to grind for hours, the mission themselves are longer and more intricate, there’s no days system or time limits, and some of the new unit types (like the warlocks) have long range magic and special attacks.
That sadly doesn’t actually changes gameplay, as even having griffins, liches and so on just means that some of the magic monster units have AOE spells, the goblins behave like regular humanoid units, and just even the variety brought upon these new types of unit is undermined by the fact the old strategies and exploits (as in, abusing/spamming cavalry units) still work like a champ even against cyclops, griffins, goblin, etc.
That said, the map design is way better, the battles now have an actual organic flow to them, really giving you the feeling of being invested in a big field battle against hundreds, thousand of enemies, there’s more emphasis on using catapults and the likes, and even with the issues discussed above, the new monster units/troops to do ultimately spice things up and provide some actual challenge, a challenge, since you still can’t oneshot dragons with your cavalry… not right away, i mean.
Speaking of which, you do get to eventually control units like dragons and the griffins… they don’t really fly, shame because that would have added some welcome strategic depth… or broke the gameplay balance even further, most likely, though Omega Force overegged the pudding while trying to fix the non-existant difficulty of the main game.
As in, they do go overboard on the opposite direction, leading to some really frustrating moments in the final chapters, when the game decides to make you lose half an hour of progress due to getting instakilled by a single arrow, or by making an already difficult and long battle go on even further by spawning another huge wave of foes that hit way too hard for it to be anywhere near “fair”.
It just makes me wanna stop bothering, especially since they did reuse all the maps and assets from the original game…..and most likely this campaign is “cheap hard” to pad out its comparetively short runtime, at least compared to what it takes to beat the original base scenario/campaign.
Pity, because i did have more fun with the Nightmare campaign, but i was also initially put off of actually finishing it because it feels it has to overcompensate for how easy the main campaign is… badly, still nothing that a lot of grind can “fix”, and while you can try to start the Nightmare campaign right away… you’ll soon find a “level cap boss” that basically requires you to play the main scenario for some hours, since the progress in troops levels and such is shared.
So yeah, this new campaign is meant to be played after you have a lot of practice/familiarity with the original scenario of the original release, and actually, this time around i did finish both the original Hundred Years War Campaign (which takes about 30/40 hours, i’d guess 50 to complete it) and the Nightmare campaign, which is shorter but i can’t say for sure by how much since there’s no separate playtime (i think), and how grinding in the other campaign makes it a lot easier to finish.
Aside from the 2 Story Mode campaigns/scenarios, there’s a Free Mode (pretty self explanatory, especially if you come from how it works in DW/SW) and a Edit Mode, which is basically where you can create original characters via the CAW derived character editor, and also send your mercenaries off to pillage some loot away, with characters created by other players being shared and being able to join your mercenary tavern.
There is online coop and some competitive modes of sort, but i didn’t bother, honestly, i do like it has cross save, so you could have imported your saves from the old PS3 release if you wanted.
You can tell this is a mid-gen 360/PS3 title from Koei ported over, it shows, expecially in some cutscenes using the in-game engine you can see some really awful or still unloaded textures of bridges and whatnot, even with the (allegedly) improved graphics and performance, it’s not a pretty game, as it focuses on giving you tons of enemies and big maps, again, in typical Omega Force fashion, even when it’s not a Warriors game. Still looks cheap, honestly, but the absurd Dynasty Warriors style dubbing is hilarious, expecially when the game never clearly meant to.
It can also be a glitchy experience, some trophies are prone to be buggy, in some escort mission the NPC IA can go awol entirely (one time i had secured the entire map, the NPC was intact, but was just stationed outside the base it was supposed to enter, still i had to physically push him around the objective base in order to trigget the victory condition, dunno why that worked but it did), it can often crash mid-battle (some story or important battles are more prone to this than others), and it’s expecially egregious since the developers known there were some annoying or nasty glitches, they promised to fix them after release but on PS4 they never issued any patch in ever.
I especially love when you get the combo of the mission crashing after 5 days (even when there’s no days/turns limits), might even happen in one of the few missions that don’t explain (they simply do not) that you gotta get a key from a general to unlock a secret tower, so you find out by accident as you don’t know what the games wants from you and are just going around, hoping that going where the objective says will trigger the event concluding the mission this time, as it should.
Yes, i’m talking about the mission when you rescue Jeanne D’Arc, where i finally found out the game didn’t so much glitch, i did have the key but i also had to comb the entire citadel of Rouane, and finally, it did trigger the event. Over not the more obvious cathedral or a building that looks like a prison tower, but a small shady house of sorts that at this point i believe it’s the devs trolling, even more as you gotta be close to this specific building, like, absurdly close, when nothing else in the game requires or needs such specific promixity to trigger or anything.
To be completely honest, i can’t really recommend Bladestorm Nightmare, because even if i do get some enjoyement out of it, most of the time i’m bored and disappointed by how Omega Force basically did nothing to flesh out the main gameplay formula and loop, it begins and stays about the same from beginning to end, which makes for a truthful demo but not so much a full game, with some cool shit in it but also no real balance, too easy to be fun and with insane amounts of just straight up required grinding, just to pad itself out to hell and back, the bugs and glitch also there to potentially make you lose half a hour of progress because the thing crashed mid-mission. AGAIN.
even by Dynasty Warriors standards (the comparison is somehow impossible to avoid, even if they’re not even in the same genre), this is utterly repetitive, the huge selection of units is nice (there’s even Landsknecht troops for the medieval history buffs) but many are interchangable or nearly useless due to how unbalanced they are and how lacking any proper depth the gameplay is, with ideas that basically fight against each other instead of working in tandem.
Yet i do believe there’s something to it, and i do wish they would give it another shot, especially since this expanded port/semi-sequel new main content, the fantasy campaign, does improve, fix or tarp over many of the issues of the old game and main campaign, to the point i would almost advise go straight to play the Nigtmare portion…. but that is built on (and shares) the same many fundamental issues, so even a remastered release wouldn’t be enough, they just should straight up remake it, just reboot the entire series.
Not likely at, due to it being a hard sell even for niche gamers, and regardless it’s an unlikely thing to happen, as Omega Force still is in their “realism uber alles” story arc, but who knows…
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