Review by: Toni Dimayuga

If Paris Hilton were to suddenly change her name to Ayumi, give up her club-hopping lifestyle to travel the world searching for ancient artifacts, and somehow learn magic, guns, and swordsmanship, she could star as the protagonist of X-Blades.

The game starts out as a fun hack-and-slash action title with cool spell animations, but quickly degenerates into a repetitive, boring grindfest. You play as Ayumi, a bikini-and-thong-wearing treasure hunter. Perhaps developer Gaijin Entertainment wanted to outdo Lara Croft’s attire? At least Lara talks like an adult. Ayumi’s adolescent attitude and petulant remarks (which infect even the manual) sound like she’s better off hanging out at Hot Dog on a Stick rather than exploring crumbling ruins. The grating voice acting isn’t limited to her though, as whoever voices the mysteriously troubled Jay sounds like he went to the Anime School of Overacting Dubbed American Voices.

You have two main forms of attack: your gunblades, which are weapons that can switch from swords to guns instantly; and spells. Spells are unlocked by spending “souls”, which you collect by defeating enemies. Souls can also be used to heal. Collect more souls per enemy by using special combo attacks on them. Souls can also be found by breaking objects in an area, such as jugs, vases, and tombs. The need for souls to purchase spells (especially the more expensive ones) easily leads to grinding, since you can always return to a particular area and kill the enemies there. At one point I returned about ten times to one area to farm it for souls.

Although you eventually have access to a wide selection of spells, you can’t just fire off them off at will. You first have to build up “rage”, by hitting enemies with your swords or even being hit by them. Sometimes there are red crystals around to give you instant rage when you need it. The spells you unlock include single-target projectiles such as fireballs, area-of-effect (AoE) attacks, and temporary boosts to your blades such as lightning. You can bind a limited number of spells to your controller buttons and switch them out depending on the enemies you encounter. While certain spells are necessary for defeating bosses, it’s far too easy to spam AoE attacks when killing regular mobs. The spell animations of the AoEs do look cool at first, but it gets old after seeing it hundreds of times.