I recently had the opportunity to play around with a preview copy of Blade & Sword, an isometric hack n' slash n' slash n' slash developed by Beijing-based Pixel Studio and published by Whiptail Interactive. Essentially a Diablo clone set in a dark, mythical era of feudal China, the game boasts three characters, each with twelve upgradeable kung fu attacks, in addition to four "super" attacks, all of which can be further combined into combos. The game also provides the player the ability to further create their own combos, which can achieve ridiculous length over time, although the player will learn to appreciate such damage when facing the swiftly ramping difficulty.

All of the basic monsters and boss creatures are based on Chinese mythology and ghost stories, but if one does not already have a basic understanding of the genre, they are unlikely to learn more over the course of the game. Moreover, they would be lucky to figure out anything at all during their travels, as the rather roughly translated Chinese goes beyond "difficult to understand English" and into the realm of "hey, they're just making words up as they go". While the game is considerate enough to keep a journal of your quests and accomplishments, figuring out what you're supposed to accomplish and where to do it can be somewhat akin to playing darts in the dark. You might miss, you might hit, but you probably won't know either way, and in all likelihood, someone's going to lose an eye at some point.

Incoherency aside, the gameplay is put forward as something of a frantic click-fest, as the more hits you land in a combo, the more likely you are to chain a higher combo, and the more damage the player will incur on their targets. This unfortunately leaves the player with the less than enviable task of hammering one mouse button into submission, and then switching over to the other to unleash a power attack so as to inflict the maximum possible damage on some of the game's sturdier opponents. For some, this may be an example of a fine time out on the town, but for others who spend their evenings sweeping up the shattered shards of their once-proud mouse, it's a less desirable trait. With the tendency of the game to mob the player with drooling, diseased creatures, the shattered mouse is the only guaranteed outcome at the end of this engagement.

The three characters presented to the player are the basic RPG stereotypes: the burly warrior with the oversized meat cleaver, the middle-of-the-road agile swordsman, and the lithe but fragile gal with insignificant daggers. Each has their own unique array of moves and techniques, and each have a pool of health and "chi" energy to draw on during the course of their travels. Each kung-fu or special move eats up a certain amount of chi, but with stamina-restoring potions exploding out of headless zombies at every turn, this is rarely a matter for concern. In addition, health tends to regenerate fairly quickly on a medium difficulty setting, so even the most frugal potion miser can simply park his character in a corner while fixing themselves a snack and come back to find a fully recharged one-man slaughterhouse.

And a slaughterhouse it will be. Each level is set in a ruined environment or another, be it village or forest, mine or palace, and there is no shortage of hacked-up torsos and severed heads to be seen. The player can rest assured that literally hundreds of zombies, enormous frogs, tiger-men, well-armored wolves are going to be standing between them and their next mission objective at any given moment. To break up the relative ease of these minions, the player will periodically encounter a champion spirit or demon of some strange animal nature, be it a twelve-foot tall monkey in plate mail, or a five hundred pound boar-man with a spear and shield. These bosses are usually guarding a townsperson or merchant that the player is meant to liberate so that they might further assist your character back in the home village with weapon and armor upgrades, potions and throwing devices, or just assigning new missions. In this manner, the player is able to feel a sensation of actually accomplishing something other than just killing everything ugly in a five hundred mile radius. And no matter how far you travel from your home over the course of three chapters and forty levels, there are convenient teleportation platforms scattered about to take you to any previously visited locale.

The graphics are fairly dark age at the best of times, with murky colors and poorly defined characters only being hindered in their presentation at a maximum resolution of 800x600. While the player usually has a good idea of what genus they're looking at, it often takes a mouse-over to confirm what particular breed of ghoulish entity they're facing off with. Headless zombie? Poison zombie? Exploding zombie? Every battle is a voyage of discovery with this sort of obstacle in the player's path. The visuals are further impaired by animations that could best be described as "choppy", with characters suddenly, often randomly, flying across the screen during the more brutal attacks. A creature standing before you will suddenly be floating in midair on their back, slowly rising and falling, and it may take one several moments to realize this is supposed to be some sort of juggling combo attack.

Though Blade & Sword seems a promising title in some fashions, it feels as though the text needs a good chunk of time in editing, and that the game would benefit greatly from slightly sharper graphics, possibly even a bump up in maximum resolution. The setting and plot are intriguing, worth exploring, but ultimately rendered frustrating by the confusion as to what the designers are attempting to convey to the player via garbled English. With a bit of finesse and polish, this title could easily become a much more memorable piece of work, though not likely a true successor to the isometric RPG throne.