REVIEW

Blade & Soul Review

by Dominic Coles, February 10th, 2016

Blade & Soul Review A new MMO that combines fighting game combos with multiplayer mechanics has arrived. But is Blade & Soul worth investing time into? Free-To-Play MMO’s are ten a penny in this day and age with titles like Dungeons & Dragons: Neverwinter trying to capitalise on the popularity of subscription or one-time payment MMO’s. But these titles have always been under severe criticism due to their micro-transactions and their balance between free content and paid for add-ons. With that said however, Blade & Soul tries to break away from the recent streak of bad FTP MMO’s and attempts to bring something new to the table with an in depth combat system as well as a new world to explore.

The story of Blade & Soul takes us on a journey with the Hongmoon, a group of talented martial artists learning the ways of fighting high up in the clouds. You join them as a new recruit and begin your training, but before long a mysterious group, led by an enigmatic black-dressed woman called Jinsoyun, attacks the training camp. The Hongmoon are wiped out and you, as the only survivor, must find your revenge and save the citizens of the world from the coming evil. Along the way you will meet up with the various groups fighting back the darkness, each comprised of colourful characters who will help you throughout the journey. As the narrative goes, it is very well portrayed. This is due to the setup which fits well within the tutorial experience, as you learn to fight alongside your rookie character. New characters are introduced in a cool, Borderlands-style intro cutscene, showing off their defining traits, whether that be combat prowess or just their stunning good looks. These introductions give a slight sense of comedic value which is endearing, without detracting from the plot. Think of Borderlands-style as an interesting action, followed by a pose and their name coming up on screen in an artsy way.

The water colour art style helps make Blade and Soul stand out visually, looking rather unlike any of its competitors. Everything from mountain ranges, jungles, beaches and sky pavilions shine on in their own unique way. Character models are great, although some questionably look like Justin Beiber in his younger years. The texture quality is deep with you being able to identify the smallest of detail on pieces of armour or static items around the world. Although I will say that in very few cases there were texture pop ins or very low poly textures. But these were in very hard to identify areas if you are mainly concentrating on battling enemies or heading from A to B.

Blade and Soul features three main modes of transportation: fast-travel, sprinting and gliding and last but not least, the Dragon Pulses. First is the fast-travelling option that requires that you have visited a key location at least once and from then on you can select the hotspot and fast travel back to it, incurring a small cost depending on how far you will be travelling. Secondly you have the sprint and glide mechanics which use up your stamina gauge. These allow you to travel quickly over shorter distances and glide through the large expanses to give you a new perspective on your surroundings, combining both a useful mechanic as well as a way to admire what is around you. Finally we have the Dragon Pulses, which are amazing to witness. After gaining the ability to use these pulses, you can interact with lit areas on the map to traverse entire areas in ways you have never seen. This can be from dashing through the air like a ninja, running up walls, flipping, performing insanely high jumps and more. These definitely get your blood pumping and every single one feels unique, adding some much-welcomed flair to proceedings.

Now onto your character and what you can do to make them your own. The character creator itself is on par with Final Fantasy XIV’s, featuring a ton of different options to choose from as well as a full array of sliders to manage the little areas of your body, just in case you want to make a mountain of a man or the tiniest hero of the Hongmoon. You have a choice of four races all with their own classes to choose from. Some classes are shared by multiple races such as the Force Master and Kung Fu Master but some are unique such as the Destroyer, Summoner and the upcoming Warlock. Picking your class also gives you a voice over covering what the class specialises in alongside a list at the side of the screen which shows the roles they best suits, their difficulty to control and some key abilities in their arsenal. The wealth of options allows you to create the character that is perfect for you, which is always appreciated, especially when much of the competition does not offer such a comprehensive toolset. The classes themselves all feel suitably diverse with a nice mixture of light, chained attacks along with hard hitting blows and impacts. Blade Masters/Dancers are able to summon multiple blades as they fly across the battlefield with a mix of parry’s, straight lunges and consecutive slashes. Kung Fu Masters bring in a fighting style similar to Akira from the Virtua Fighter series with a combination of impactful blows as well as MMA-style ground grapples. Destroyer plays as your heavy tank/DPS class whilst also having a focus in 1v1 crowd control with powerful grab combos. Force Masters act as the game’s mages, combining the elements to deal damage as well as specialising in a lot of AoE spells. Lastly we have summoners who may seem very cutesy with their cat familiars, but they are very deadly with their double team attacks.

The classes are well balanced, both in PvP and PvE combat; each of their unique combo strings and ability set ups can make for some interesting match ups.. The PvP system overall is nicely balanced, at least in the arena. Arena combat features 1 vs 1 and 3 vs 3 combat, allowing you to pit your skills against another player or team up for some larger scale combat. Matchmaking is based around your combat abilities, meaning you’ll never come up against anyone leagues above you. Importantly, bonuses from weapons and attachments have no effect in the arena. With that said however, the world PvP behaves much differently. Early on you will have to choose between the Cerulean Order and the Chaos Legion (Red or Blue team). You can raise your standing with these factions by taking part in PvP battles for them. You can activate your hostility at any time by dawning the appropriate outfit. The problem that arises with this is that your weapon bonuses and attachments do add power to your abilities in this case meaning that some fights can seem rather unfair.

If you wish to avoid combat, then the outfit system has your back, as you can only be engaged in combat when you’re wearing a combat outfit… If you find yourself getting trounced more often than not, it could either be that youre simply up against a more skilful player or that they have vastly superior equipment; in short the world combat has little in the way of balancing so expect he who has the pointiest stick to prevail.. Some players will enjoy this mode, but others will find it completely tedious. Speaking of outfits, these are what you will wear throughout the game. They give no statistical advantage, so you can literally wear what you think suits best. Some outfits however, as stated above, do cause you to be hostile against certain factions. Interesting if you want to have a challenging PvE session or you want to take on other players.

To give you some defence, the game instead offers a soul shield which is an eight-part dial that can be filled with individual segments. You can mix and match these segments for small boosts to stats, or you can complete a full soul shield of a certain type to maximise its usage and gain special bonus rewards. This encourages players to go out and explore all the different areas and try out a plethora of different shield set ups. Some are built for damage and criticals, whilst others are built for health and resistances. You can also wear one and have a second in reserve which you can switch to at any time, allowing you to switch styles on the fly.

PvE Dungeons are incredibly fun to play around with. Once you reach a certain point in the game you will gain access to the use of the dungeon finder, which I find to be one of the best in all the MMO’s I have played. This takes your character to a waiting lobby whilst you set up what dungeons you wish to go to and either look for a team of random players or invite your friends. What makes this better than the competitors is that when picking your dungeon you can choose from three and set them into your search list. This will then help you find a team of players who are queueing up to those dungeons and help you get In to a game faster. In addition to this, you can also set up your team finder so that you want players around your level range or even have players of all classes rather than a mismatch of all DPS classes with no healer. This gives you freedom to pick out what you believe is the best outcome and put together your team properly before heading into the fray. Completing these dungeons also will reward you with unique loot and most of them also come with a daily quest which you can claim either in the dungeon lobby or in the world.

Blade & Soul is well balanced and has plenty of content to enjoy, but there is a problem that causes one major part of the MMO to be almost unplayable. This is with world based resources known as Quartz and how it respawns. Quartz is required for almost all major crafting items in the game including keys for opening weapon boxes and unsealing charms for equipment. Crafting in MMOs has always been a fundamental part of what players can do to enhance their experience. But the game has this specific mineable resource as a world-based entity and not instance-based. In other words, if there are a thousand players on a map and there is one source of Quartz on that map, the first person to find, mine and gather the quartz will get it whilst everyone else has to wait. This wouldn’t be a problem if the respawn times were reliable, but they are not. Quartz roughly respawns every half hour with the rare alternatives ranging from an hour to two hours before they spawn back in. This has caused the player marketplace to go crazy with one single piece of this material selling for around ten silver, which is almost equal to buying a key or unsealing charm from an NPC.

Crafting is a core part of the MMO experience for many players, so to have such a huge restriction on player’s ability to craft is disappointing. Games have used instance-based resources in the world so that players can gain a profit out of creating the important items on the market place. Especially if they can sell it at a more affordable price than NPCs. Having this however has caused outrage in some places in the game with people saying that they cannot commit to crafting properly because Quartz is so few and far between. But also, buying Quartz and constructing what you wish to sell on the market will take you back a lot of in-game money, to the extent where those crafted items are now selling for an incredibly large amount, which only takes away from the experience. Especially when you have access to this mechanic at level fifteen as it is something new for you to experience and try out.It is a shame to see, but unless this gets changed the act of crafting in this game may be a lost cause.

Blade and Soul is one of the best value Free-To-Play MMOs on the market today. The micro transactions are never forced upon and only consist of aesthetics or premium account bonuses. What makes the game stand out however is definitely the art style coupled with the unique combat styles of each character, making any and all battles alone and with a team insane to be a part of with combos being a huge bonus. PvP is also really fun and engaging with fighting game style anticipation and engagement. It is just a shame to see that the crafting system is made inferior due to the choice of having world based resources. If you can put that part of the game to one side however, the rest of the experience is top notch and easily deserves your play time.