Die by the Blade Review (Fahros)
Alright so here's the deal, going to try my best to give a fair review after 5.5ish hours of playing.
I bought this game as a meme. I didn't take it too seriously or expect it to be a AAA fighting game. If you have that outlook on it, I think you will be able to really enjoy it for what it is.
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Pros:
Fun and engaging PvP combat. The stance switching requires strategy and reaction to execute and deal with from your opponent. The feinting works nicely on defensive opponents, and the spacing and whiff punishing works nicely on aggressive opponents.
There's ranking leaderboard for ranked PvP.
The netcode seemed good, game mostly felt offline. I honestly don't know what type of netcode the game has, but if it's rollback I did not notice a single rollback, and if it's delay, I didn't notice any delays. So it just felt legitimately offline and next to perfect when fighting other people.
No necessary or highly incentivized microtransactions. Once you buy the game you're good to go, you'll just have to spend a minimal amount of time unlocking what you want.
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Cons:
The camera is all messed up. Sometimes it'll swing over to you when you're on 2player side at the beginning of the match, and you will literally not see your opponent for the first second or so of the match. They can roll at you or attack you and it'll be flying right at you as the camera readjusts itself. Sometimes the camera swings around randomly during the fights too. Sometimes it gets caught behind a box and you literally cannot see your character or theirs. That's pretty rare, but it has happened to me. The camera is definitely the worst part of the game, and a real annoyance if you are taking a match seriously.
I didn't have any FPS issues during the actual fighting, but when you get a kill or a cinematic finish the game does hiccup and the frames do not smoothly transition from one thing to another. It doesn't impact the outcome of a fight, but it may annoy you. Game does not feel particularly optimized overall, and it also screwed with my google chrome BADLY when alt/tabbed, but the bread and butter fighting of the game works fine.
When you get a ranked match you will not be able to see your opponents rank, and also when you finish the match you will not see how much your rank changed, neither positively or negatively. You'll have to go to the leaderboard and monitor your rank points through there yourself, since the game doesn't tell you the changes after a ranked match.
Limited Training Mode Options are another con for sure. The training mode is very barebones.
The tutorial mode mostly worked, but when testing the provided combos it did bug out near the last one and reset every time I struck the training opponent. Gotta list that as another con.
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Overall fun game and I can recommend it to someone who can appreciate it for what it is. A memey, fun, mess around fighting game, to get some 1-hit kills in and have some laughs. But if you expect it to be a polished, perfect, AAA fighting game, you're better off avoiding this one, at least for now.