When I first played Prince of Persia, I loved its sense of style but wished that it handled as smoothly as it looked and ditched its 'timed mission' premise to let its more deliberate control scheme breathe. Blackthorne - with its control scheme almost entirely lifted from its spiritual predecessor - does exactly that, and has an amazing dreary oppressive dystopian-fantasy atmosphere to boot, so I feel like I should like it a lot more than I do. But the actual design of the levels themselves let the game experience down somewhat.
The gameplay loop is equal parts asskicking and exploration, and there is a slight puzzle element to the stages as you try to find the right items in order to access more and more of each level. While a bit of nonlinearity is nice in a game like this, the stages are too sprawling and you move around very sluggishly which means plenty of slow tedious backtracking through areas you've already cleared trying to find a way to progress. I also have to mention that there's a point in the third level where it's very easy to get softlocked if you descend from a platform before getting a required key item, and you have no choice but to reset the game. Thankfully there is a password system, and the game feels like it was made to be played in small bursts. Still, it felt like many of the puzzle elements were very samey and by about halfway through the game, it had already shown me everything that it had.
...well, almost everything that it had. Because the last boss came along and utterly kicked my ass inside out. I'm not sure if the final boss is a plus or a minus point; he played like a typical action-game final boss while all your moves operate on a half-second lag, which made the entire fight seem like artificial difficulty dialed up to eleven. Then again the game lets you continue straight from the beginning of the battle if you lose, and eventually I understood his attack patterns enough to beat him with one pixel of life remaining, which was really quite exhilarating. It was a moment of catharsis and 'Eureka!' that was unfortunately quite rare in this well-made but also rather bloated game.
The gameplay loop is equal parts asskicking and exploration, and there is a slight puzzle element to the stages as you try to find the right items in order to access more and more of each level. While a bit of nonlinearity is nice in a game like this, the stages are too sprawling and you move around very sluggishly which means plenty of slow tedious backtracking through areas you've already cleared trying to find a way to progress. I also have to mention that there's a point in the third level where it's very easy to get softlocked if you descend from a platform before getting a required key item, and you have no choice but to reset the game. Thankfully there is a password system, and the game feels like it was made to be played in small bursts. Still, it felt like many of the puzzle elements were very samey and by about halfway through the game, it had already shown me everything that it had.
...well, almost everything that it had. Because the last boss came along and utterly kicked my ass inside out. I'm not sure if the final boss is a plus or a minus point; he played like a typical action-game final boss while all your moves operate on a half-second lag, which made the entire fight seem like artificial difficulty dialed up to eleven. Then again the game lets you continue straight from the beginning of the battle if you lose, and eventually I understood his attack patterns enough to beat him with one pixel of life remaining, which was really quite exhilarating. It was a moment of catharsis and 'Eureka!' that was unfortunately quite rare in this well-made but also rather bloated game.