![]() ![]() However, you don’t have much control when this happens, and the fact it can be easy to wall climb on accident means that you may end up carefully trying to navigate yourself out of a pit of spikes, only to accidentally wall climb and zip off the wall right down onto them. When jumping towards a wall, your ninja will run up for a bit, and then automatically jump towards the other side. Honestly, I found stealth worked better when it was followed by normal attacks or subweapons, rather than the picky assassination technique.Īnother big gripe I had comes from a technique that seems handy on paper, but isn’t executed all that well here, and that’s the wall climb. Stealth in general is a bit awkward, as while you can crouch and sneak up that way, going from fast-paced running and jumping to slow stealth for the sake of EXP gain just ends up slowing down the pace. ![]() This is the same button as your block, and more often than not I’d find myself slowly sneaking up on a foe only to end up blocking, and thus wasting enough time that I was detected and had to fight normally. One of the biggest the game tries to push on you is the technique of assassination, where you sneak behind an enemy and then press the Y button to instantly kill them. Jumping from platform to platform, slashing down enemies, this gameplay loop isn’t really that bad, but there are some irritations I had, especially when it came to some of the side objectives. Luckily the controls are pretty decent, offering a surprising amount of speed! Your ninja moves rather quickly, and it feels awesome using that fast speed in combination with his double jump to zip around platforms, especially as you unlock new abilities such as a dash move. Experience is gained by completing stage objectives, and while some may be incredibly basic, others will have you try and do various tasks, whether it’s finding a secret pathway in a level, defeating a certain amount of enemies, or avoid detection, clearing the objectives in the top right corner will reward you with EXP, which is key to unlocking the skill tree and getting more abilities. This is mainly done by collecting coins and materials from chests and enemy drops, while also working to gain experience points to use in the main hub town to unlock new skills and moves. You start off with a very basic combo attack and a sword, but gradually grow to gain more materials, subweapons, skills, and other unlockables over time. Within The Blade is an action platformer, with the main objective of each stage being to reach the end while defeating and sneaking by enemies in your way. It’s fine and gets the job done as you pull off your speedy endeavors throughout the stages, but there’s nothing that’ll make you want to look for a tune outside of the game. For starters, dialogue boxes have animated portraits associated with them, and they’re pretty well made! In blunt honesty, these portraits end up being better than most of the dialogue, since the conversations in this game are incredibly simplistic, almost to the point of parody at times.Įasily the most stunning part of the entire presentation by far comes from the cutscenes, which are also in pixel form, but with super impressive scaling and full-screen animations, basically taking the sort of stuff you’d see in a game like Ninja Gaiden and going all out with it, leading to some pretty epic boss and chapter introductions! I do wish the music had something of this level of impressiveness, since it just uses a lot of typical motifs to produce average music. That doesn’t mean there aren’t parts I find impressive in how Within the Blade looks. Within the Blade continues the trend of providing a pixel art style, and I’ve already said dozens of times how I feel about these throwback look, and most of that applies here: the overall game looks fine, and the sprites here do have fast, slick animation to them, but generally it’s not something I haven’t seen before, and it actually reminded me a bit of Woblyware games at first, which led me to being surprised when I learned this wasn’t even developed by them! In this action platformer, you take control of a Ninja, who must use the power of his blade to stop an evil lord from taking over all of Japan! A very basic tale as simple as time, in yet another throwback to the ninja platformers of the past! Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code Title: Within The Blade ![]()
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