BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (Review)
Approaching a new beat ‘em up name for the first time can be a tricky affair, with no familiar character to go for at the character select screen, your first impressions of the game are severely at risk. Do you pick the huge mass of muscle, the one with a sword, the one made up of a Studio Ghibli oil slick nightmare or simply the one with the biggest boobs?
Choose carefully my friends because you won’t pick up a brawler this year with such a diverse set of fighters. There might only be twelve to choose from, but any similarities are minor. There aren’t any Ken, Ryu and Akuma-style remixes of characters here. Pick the wrong one and you might get a rough start. However, things start to look up once you find a character that suits your own individual style.
Using the X button works as a type of combat modifier, but in a different way for everyone. For Litchi Faye Ling it means she’ll stick her staff in the ground and fight unarmed. Pressing X again will make the staff spin its way back to you wherever you are, usually catching your opponent round the face on route. For Noel Vermillion X acts as a combo starter for the other face buttons, making for some excellent fact paced moves with some powerful, short range firearms. An excellent character to start with.
Much has been made of BlazBlue as an immediately accessible game for newcomers to the genre. However, the extra difficulty of some characters goes totally against this. There are a few button-basher friendly ones here but not many. Some characters are hugely outbalanced too, with nippy characters generally battering the likes of the lumbering Tager. The game’s presentation outside of the retro-styled graphics is very hardcore too which can be quite off-putting. Rounds are called ‘Rebels’, characters are selected with a mouse-style cursor off a dial and the screen can become very cluttered with mystical dials and other such crap before fights.
Command lists are anti-newbs too as they list moves with buttons not corresponding with the PS3 pad, but rather the original arcade ones. Sure it’s not hard to remember which is which, but why do we have to do the extra work? I can almost hear someone hitting their screen with their Horai arcade stick in disagreement.
Click here to read the rest of my review over at Dealspwn.com.
