X-Blades is clearly way worse than DMC2 and yet far from the worst game in the genre.

When it was first announced in Russia (where it went under the name "Oniblade"), I thought this was a sequel or a spin-off to Oni, another anime-style action game. This was early internet days for me, so I still wasn't very used to researching. The trailers looked pretty cool, so when it came out, I eagerly bought it. Imagine my disappointment when I played it.

X-Blades is a pretty weird and insane game, so I wouldn't be surprised if it has its cult following. It has this pretty nice, cartoony artstyle, a story that's a sort of mix between Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia, and you can tell a lot of effort went into all aspects of the game. Not to say that effort equals quality.

Although the artstyle is nice, it's kinda ruined by the abundance of special effects and overly-saturated colors. It's kind of exhausting. For some strange reason, the cutscenes are much less red than the actual game. And the protagonist looks like she has a fake tan in the cutscenes, but in the actual game she's straight up orange. And where you'd see sunsets in the cutscenes, in the game it's just red skies with red clouds. If you ever thought DmC: Devil May Cry had a unique artstyle, play this game and be proven wrong (or play the Mysterio levels in Spider-Man 2: The Game on PC).

Having said that, being so over-the-top actually makes the visuals kinda dreamlike in a trashy sort of way. Kinda like the dreamcore aesthetic. And the arenas being so huge really makes you wanna put down the weapons and just explore this landscape to some ethereal music.

The actual music in this game is this generic rock, very typical for early 2000s slav-jank. I dunno why nobody told the devs that it was 2007.

The gameplay is trying to do the Devil May Cry thing and let you handle both melee and ranged weapons simultaneously. Except shooting is extremely boring here. In DMC 2, which is berated for bad shooting, you had a lot of weapons to pick from, and the acrobatics allowed you to shoot enemies while jumping over them, strategically choose which enemies to take out first, and there was a nice feedback from certain weapons. Here you literally just hold down the right mouse button and there's only one weapon to shoot, with virtually no feedback.

Speaking of feedback, the melee weapons don't have much of it either. But there is something interesting going on there with melee combat. I think, when you slash enemies, it stuns them for like a millisecond. So when you get surrounded by constantly spawning enemies, as long as you keep turning around and slashing in all directions, you can score like 100+ hit chains. It's a sort of crowd control, and probably the best aspect of the game. You can also purchase skills, some of which are kinda interesting. One of the early ones is an aoe attack that slows the game down for a second, allowing you to take a deep breath and stare at the protagonist's naked ass, which you'll be seeing throughout the entirety of the game, because it was made by horny weebs. If you're a horny weeb yourself, there's a high chance you'll find this game a hidden gem or something.

But the absolute worst aspect of this game, and what kinda kills it for me, is that the devs have no sense of moderation (which really should've been obvious from the visuals alone). Every battle in the game lasts for like 10 minutes, I think, of you tediously repeating the exact same moves against the exact same enemies. Some enemies and bosses can only be shot or hit with magic, the former of which is boring as hell and takes away too few HP, while the latter requires mana that you need to constantly replenish. People like to dunk on DMC2's bosses that could only be shot (Helicopter and Trismagia), but at least they were cool (in the case of helicopter the level consisting of many different challenges, and in the case of Trismagia the visual design) and didn't take forever to kill.

But this lack of moderation is also present in other gameplay sequences, such as being stuck in a room with spikes popping out of the floor for like 5 minutes. Honestly, the first time you encounter this or the respawning enemies, it genuinely feels like you're just doing something wrong, because the segment keeps going on and on. But no, you just gotta force yourself through it.

I can't help but feel like, if the devs reduced the number of enemies and the length of other challenges, this could've honestly been a relatively okay and interesting game. I'd play it for just the dreamlike environments. But which Russian ever cared about doing their job well?

I'm kidding of course, their generals in the Caucasian War did a pretty good job at genociding the local populations. Although even that took them (a huge empire with modern military) over 60 years to win against outnumbered and fragmented tribal communities. But hey, they'll never make a video game about that!