Recent reviews by Willow

Giga ♥♥♥♥, barely nothing new, none of the older survivors got any alternative abilities, the void survivor has no alternatives at ALL, Sniper is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ version of sniper from Ror1, they completely squandered the amazing void theme they could have expanded on.

I wanted more.
This is pathetic.

It only released 3 months before the year ended and my gosh did it become the game of the year. All I will say is that if you haven't played the game you REALLLLLY should.

And remember, theres nothing bad on the web! Good Golly! Who would ever say such a thing :)

As much as I want to recommend this game, I just can't, for a multitude of reasons.

I just want to say that as a Roguelike, Roguelite fan, the influence of games such as Hades and Dead Cells is quite obvious with this one, as certain aspects seem like complete 1 to 1s but just fail to work.

For example, this game has 3 main upgrades you can find in game, finished with 1 health upgrade. These consists of Cryo, Electro and Fire. As a Hades player this will feel extremely reminisscent of the god system there, where all of the gods will give you a choice of 3 vastly varying upgrades, where most of the time either will feel unique, useful in its own way and helpful, along with being linked with an appropiate god,
Blade Assault does something similar. At the end of a stage, you get a choice between 1 or 2 gates, with either 4 of these upgrades, along with chests you can find during the stage, you get quite a few items. However most of the time, these upgrades make ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. This game also has a rarity system on upgrades, of course being roguelite it depends on RNG, but the upgrades are just so pathetic and has little reason to be under a unique category. Like for example, why is a 7 percent damage boost under the Fire tree, and why is a crit boosting upgrade under the Electro tree, whilst a CRYO boosting upgrade is in the normal itempool of chests?? Why isn't that one in Cryo when it has an obvious link to it?

These upgrades are also just not fun whatsoever, and the amount of these are quite low, so you will run into a BUNCH of doubles, along with most of the electro, fire and cryo upgrades clashing against each other, meaning you need to trade away one of them instead of synergizing means that just chasing one of the categories will give you better results in the long run, but then you miss out on normal upgrades such as damage boost.

What made Hades system work, compared to this one, was that you were given a choice of 3 upgrades which almost always had importance on their own, but also let you customize your run appropriately, but Blade Assault gives you 3 bad options, and sometimes even an upgrade which makes sense to be under their category tree.

But in the beginning of this review I mentioned a multitude of problems right? Let's get to those.

The character upgrades/weapons.
During your stage you can find upgrades which you can level your character with, for example percent dmg, extra health and etc. These again have no charm or personality whatsoever and are just basic upgrades, but sure. Character upgrades maybe aren't supposed to be that special, I can accept that, but then the weapons come in which are just sooooo boring.

There are 3 weapons, the sword (The fun one), the gun (the good one) and the axe, (the slooooooow one)
The only fun weapon to use is the sword, which is a quick, dashy and jumpy fighting style, it has 2 abilities, a basic slash and a twirling jump, but lets you get a tiny bit customizable later and lets you choose between a few ones. Then there is the gun, basic run and shoot, run and shoot, run and shoot. It has to reload somtimes which just feels clunky and has no animation, along with its ability being a half done twirl like the sword, only it shoots you backwards. The axe is a heavy hitter, but doesnt hit heavy enough to make you feel like wielding a big axe, it has a charge function which is just too slow to ever use and yields a boring style. All of these have their own tiny optimization when you choose them, for example the sword letting you choose a small percentage increase in crit when you hit something.

This might all again sound like Hades, which it basically is, only it lacks charm. In that game you also have a variety of choices of weapons, with their own upgrades. The difference is that in Hades the singular ability was fun to use and unique, along with benefitting a ton from god specific upgrades, Blade Assault does almost the same, just not good.

The bosses are just meh.
Mac, the first boss for example has barely telegraphed gunplay, he just spams, reloads and does whatever, the way to beat him easily everytime is to stand on one of the platforms and spam basic, he wont do anything except shoot and reload against nothing while you can hit his broken hitbox all day long with no danger.

Along with bosses not being that polished, enemy AI completely breaks if you just walk enough to the left or right, and ranged enemies refuse to move. It's as if the enemy forgets you exist and let's you take a breather as much as you want

There are also a bunch of grammatical errors which throws me out of the immersion.


As negative as I have sounded throughout this review, I do like the game as a guilty pleasure, and I adore the theme and the pixel graphics, but the game itself is just not good objectively, it needs polishing and rewriting big parts of the game.

I have yet to refund the game but I am seriously debating doing this.

It has been over 8 hours and I have still not gotten my emote.... Going to file a ticket soon..

It's great

The Binding of Isaac except that it doesn't get boring after 15 minutes

One of the greatest games I have ever played, I will keep this game with me until the day I die and I will stand by that. This game has kept me entertained way more than any other game i've played so far (ok, maybe like third place but still).