#Blud Review (Bread Panda)
An incredible artstyle and interesting concept overall brought down by irritating combat, tedious backtracking and tiresome quest designing.
As was said in another review, to paraphrase: "A game with a great artstyle and animation but with bad gameplay is a bad game. There is no excuse".
I will try to go through and list the pros and cons part by part to give you the best idea I can.
PROS:
- Artstyle and animation clearly has time and effort and love put into it (however I imagine due to this, attention was neglected on the actual game design itself).
- A few of the puzzles past the halfway point of the game did have me enjoying small brainteasers and item usage.
- The bosses, at least, most of them, have good designs and mostly feel fair (as for the bad ones, I will get to that shortly).
- Dialogue and characters are mostly charming and I found myself chuckling on a few occasions.
- The Hockey Stick powerups you acquire later on in the game do help with exploration and combat (mostly). It would have been nice to see this better explored than what we had.
CONS:
- Enemy design is frustrating. Some of the more dangerous ones have NO windup animations to provide the player a fair window to avoid damage, so you are forced to make a guesstimate on when to duck away to MAYBE avoid taking damage and then thus hit the enemy.
-You are offered no invincibility frames when rolling, which can leave you open for other enemy attacks.
-Player's attack animations and 'execution' animations also leave the player open for more damage.
-Most of the quests are, sadly, the ever-present "Fetch Quests" which offer no enjoyment nor new environment exploration and serves as needless busywork. What makes this all the more negative is the game itself -- through a character interaction -- acknowledges this issue, which offers no humor or excuses.
-A few of the bosses (Namely the final boss, which I will get to next) are simply irritating to fight against since they too lack proper wind up animations to give the player a chance to avoid damage. Particularly one of the late game bosses, Dragur's Second Lieutenant, has a second phase that completely lacks proper attack windows and I found myself dying there frequently.
SPOILER ENDGAME REVIEWS:
I Do want to preface this part saying I cannot recall all of the spoilers nor do I wish to attempt to recall them. This game has drained me enough.
-The final boss against Dragur is an utter slog. Near instant attacks with little to no tell. A gauntlet of enemies you have to run through or risk taking even more damage before reaching him again. If you die at ANY point during this fight, you must do it all over again. What's worse is this is an exact repeat of an earlier match against Dragur in an earlier chapter (minus the gauntlet and endgame cutscenes).
-The story's end cutscenes and wrap up feel oddly rushed. Again I apologize for not trying to recount more of this particular part, however I do not wish to spend more energy than I already have.
It's just not worth it at full price. I recommend you spend your money on another game or wait for this to go on a good discount if you truly find yourself curious.