Black Knight Sword Review XBLA

Black Knight Sword is retro platform cum hack and Slash side scroller, which delivers old school sensibilities and a disturbing macabre setting, with none of these attributes being for the faint hearted!

Everything starts off relatively nicely. The game is well presented as a theatre production. The stage curtains frame the screen at all times and while you wait for the game to load, you can hear the audience chunner and musicians preparing. As the curtain draws back however, you get the first glimpse of the game's dark mood, as your character becomes the black Knight, with powers bestowed by some kind of little sprite type creature who accompanies you along your journey. Very little else is known at this point, or any point throughout the game! The plot is deliberately non existent and only adds to the atmosphere, as you are left to conjour your own story for this faceless Black Knight. As you leave the opening room, you find yourself traversing a tutorial section with one dimensional interior stage sets and props popping up everywhere. Next you find that doors used to progress are presented as colourful medieval jousting tents, before you are thrust into a dark and grimy exterior noire with sillouhetted buildings visible in the twilight yonder, as you are attacked by a range of odd cardboard cut out characters pulled straight from one of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations. Just as you think you are residing in some kind of medieval time period, you find yourself confronted by a Microwave oven to bash open. At this point, you realise that this game is a mish mash of visual styles, themes and objects that have no right to co-exist in the same game, and no logical pattern to them whatsoever!!



Black Knight Sword comes from the imagination of Suda 51, a designer renowned for bizarre games such as Killer 7, Shadows of the Damned, and recently, Lollipop Chainsaw. If you are familiar with his work, you won't be surprised at how random and weird this game is. Modern day items and backdrops co-exist with the surreal. Cardboard cut outs co-exist with the organic. It's all completely unpredictable. A lot of modern gamers, will find the aesthetics do little for them, but personally, I find it refreshingly different, and love the atmosphere it creates.

As mentioned, the game plays out as a hack and slash side scroller, with platform elements thrown in. The knight is pretty nimble and the obligatory double jump move is there. Initially, you have only a thrusting attack and a dodge move available to you, but at the end of each of the five stages, you are presented with a new ability, such as the ability to launch your little sprite friend towards foes, similar to how you launch "The force" in R-type. There is also a bizarre shop available, in which you can strengthen your Knight with a limited range of power ups, using the dropped hearts of dispatched foes as currency. Initially, everything is pretty easy, and I quickly found myself on stage 3 of the five, and I thought it was gonna be all over in no time. How wrong I was!! Things quickly become old school tough.



This game is not for everyone! It is hardcore. Enemies follow seemingly linear patterns, and then suddenly deviate. Boss attack patterns can be impossible to read. Enemy numbers become overwhelming on higher difficulties and often hard to deal with. Your Knight can often feel underpowered. I found myself dropping the difficulty to easy, just to try and reach the ending for reviewing purposes, and I still found myself dying numerous times, and facing a frustrating final boss. Additional modes include, Arcade Mode, which is a timed run through with absolutely crazy difficulty, and Challenge mode, which is a series of 25 mini time trials featuring various elements of the game. These are also very hard, they often only take a few seconds each, but there is still plenty of time to die in each one!!! Not a game for those seeking an easy gamerscore max!!



Black Knight Sword is a game from another era. An era when gamers probably had fewer games and more patience. It's very challenging, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. You'll know from my review whether or not this type of challenge is for you, and you'll love or hate the game accordingly. personally, as a lover of all things retro, I do like this kind of thing. Whether I have the inclination to spend the time necessary to completely master this game is another matter, as I just have too many games to get through. Back in the nineties, I would have risen to the challenge with gusto, and if you do put the time into Black Knight Sword, you'll find that it is actually very fair.

Where Black Knight Sword loses points for me is that, it is a bit lacking in content. It could do with more stages and a larger variety of enemies. It takes time to get through the game, but only because you die so many times. The game is a lot smaller than many of the platform games of the nineties. I would also have liked the shop element to have been expanded on quite a bit. Perhaps also, the range of acquired new attacks!! The ones that are there seem quite pointless and inappropriate most of the time, and you only really use them on a couple of specific occasions. The other aspect I didn't like was the evasive roll move. You have to press down and X to roll, and this is sometimes very unintuitive in this game, and I found myself inadvertently rolling off platforms to my death on several occasions. Mapping this move to just a single button press would have rectified this issue.

So this is a good game, but one which is an acquired taste, and is just lacking in something to push it into the category of an 8 rated game! If you like challenging old school games, definitely get it. If you don't you probably wont like it. Simple as that.