Game Reviews

Blades of Brim - Nothing to get excited about

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iOS
| Blades of Brim
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Blades of Brim - Nothing to get excited about
|
iOS
| Blades of Brim

It's not Blades of Brim's fault that I ended up playing it after some extended sessions of Canabalt and ALONE, after a lengthy chat with the former game's dev.

But it did put into perspective one of the big problems with a lot of endless runners - they're just not that exciting.
They might be pretty and entertain in a fairly mindless manner, but they're too often the gaming equivalent of having music noodling away in the background, rather than the BEST BAND EVER smashing riffs into your ears from six feet away.

That's not to say Blades of Brim is some kind of failure - because it isn't. The basic premise is fine, with your runner tootling along a three-lane 3D path, killing an endless horde of minions by rolling through them or hacking them to pieces with a weapon.

The graphics are vibrant and smooth, if a bit lacking in character, with enemies that look like rejects from Despicable Me. But painted purple.

Not cutting edge

When it comes to the soundtrack, you get a perfectly adequate, vaguely rousing medieval cinematic number, and the usual range of entirely sufficient sound effects.

The controls are decent enough, enabling you to jump, roll, and hack your way through endless purple misfits, gradually chaining hits as the difficulty ramps up.

And the level design pushes things a notch beyond merely satisfactory, managing to be actually quite good. There are three lanes, some graphical variety, and a reasonable number of branching pathways.

There are missions. There are pet dragons to summon, which temporarily provide the means to quickly fry enemies. There are stash points, for ensuring any collected swag (coins, chests that bestow weapons) aren't lost.

And inevitably there's a ton of upgrades that you'll need to grind or pay for. And it's all fine.

A bit dull

For free, you can't really go wrong. At the very least, Blades of Brim is a perfectly OK way to spend an hour or two.

Stick around for the long term and it gets a bit grindy and may need the odd IAP infusion. It's an entirely acceptable game. But it's hard to get excited about something that just isn't all that exciting.

Blades of Brim - Nothing to get excited about

There is nothing much wrong with Blades of Brim, but there's nothing much to grab you and yell "PLAY ME!" either
Score
Craig Grannell
Craig Grannell
Craig gets all confused with modern games systems with a million buttons, hence preferring the glass-surfaced delights of mobile devices. He spends much of his time swiping and tilting (sometimes actually with a device), and also mulling why no-one’s converted Cannon Fodder to iPad.