Blade Strangers

Genre: Fighting Game

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local / Online)

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Review:

Blade Strangers is a Fighting Game released on multiple platforms in 2018 including the Nintendo Switch, and its claim to fame is a roster that includes characters from numerous indie games such as Cave Story, The Binding of Isaac, and Shovel Knight.

Graphically, this is a good-looking 2D pixel art game, with some good animation, and the 3D backgrounds look decent, if a bit lacking in detail. Honestly, these backgrounds are my biggest complaint about the game. With legendary licenses like Shovel Knight and Binding of Isaac, these locations should leap off of the screen with great memories of these games, but instead they only vaguely remind me of the locations they’re supposed to represent.

Even the music, featuring electric guitar-filled remixes of songs from these games, is only recognizable if I’m specifically listening for it. And the characters, all voiced in Japanese, are likewise frequently unrecognizable as the characters they’re supposed to represent – yes, that looks like Shovel Knight, but he sounds like every “tough guy” anime character ever. If this game wanted to trade on nostalgia, it really should have worked in more of the elements of the games these characters are pulled from.

While the presentation has its ups and downs, the gameplay here is solid, albeit surprisingly slow-paced. However, its slow pacing pairs well with its simple gameplay that has players using simple button and direction combinations to perform all of the game’s moves, resulting in this being an extremely easy game to pick up and play. If you’re new to the genre and looking for a good entry point, there are far worse games you could pick to start with. On the other hand though, while this game is not lacking in depth, it’s not an especially deep game either, with limited move sets and not a whole lot of imagination in most characters’ moves.

This is in part because the game features a fairly limited roster, with only 17 characters (including post-launch characters), which doesn’t allow for a lot of variety in its move set. This is one of the game’s worst flaws, and it’s made even more egregious by this game’s asking price – $40 is simply an insane price for a game with fewer than 20 characters, especially when, as I’m writing this, BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, which features a similar premise of bringing characters from various franchises together, has over 50 characters for $50, and Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R features a roster of 25 characters for $15. Or, if you’re looking for a simple, beginner-friendly fighting game, there’s Fantasy Strike, which does have a smaller roster of ten fighters, but they’re far more imaginative, and the game is free to play. Oh, and while Blade Strangers does offer online play, its online servers are a ghost town at this point, so don’t expect to make much use of that feature.

While the normal asking price for Blade Strangers is ridiculous, if you can get it on sale at a good price, this is a decent beginner-friendly fighting game with an enticing cast of playable characters. This isn’t a super-deep fighting game, and I wish more had been done to capitalize on these legendary characters, but what’s here is good, and should be worth trying out for both fans of the genre and especially those looking to get into Fighting games for the first time.

tl;dr – Blade Strangers is a Fighting Game featuring characters from Shovel Knight, Cave Story, and various other indie games, and its slower pacing and simple controls make it ideal for newer players who are just getting used to the genre. Having said that, I wish the game did more to utilize these different game licenses, the online servers are deserted, and the $40 price tag is way too steep, especially for its limited roster. If you can get it on sale it’s still worth playing though.

Grade: C+

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