Blade and soul online review torrent#

It's far more Street Fighter than World of Warcraft, even to an extent unmatched by TERA. Few MMOs pull off combat better, and each of the seven classes can unleash combos that require watching what players and NPCs are doing in an effort to counter them. I just wanted to punch stuff.Īnd boy, does Blade & Soul oblige. By Level 15, I'd largely stopped caring about what the people I encountered had to say at all. The opening quests and cutscenes benefit from a welcome dose of cinematic suspense and camaraderie, but the tale quickly loses momentum in the drudgy march from one hub for kill-and-fetch quests to the next. The story starts off on a respectable (if predictable) note, when the Hongmoon School gets wiped out, leading to a 45-level-long quest for revenge.

Considering its age, it's no surprise some of these landscapes suffer from poor textures and muddy details, but Blade & Soul generally presents them with a degree of style. Still, it does achieve a certain grandeur in parts, whether it's in the intricate weapons or the fantastic landscapes stuffed with cloud-swept pagodas and blossoming woods. Blade & Soul might be showing its age already, but it doesn't lack for beauty.

Blade and soul online review torrent#

Blade & Soul is a time capsule of sorts that contains few of the quality-of-life changes introduced to the genre over the past few years, and the usual bugbears strut across the stage here: the wide tunnels for leveling that hint at an open world but don't really deliver it, the torrent of mindless kill-and-fetch quests, and the hyper-sexualized depictions of women and young girls that leave many Westerners either shuddering with shame or giggling at the proportions. It's only 'new' in the West East Asian players have enjoyed it since it came out in South Korea way back in 2012, when it and other Korean MMORPGs like TERA started to grab headlines for action combat. And that's why I'm so sad that the rest of the game never reaches the same heights.īlade & Soul's problems partly spring from its timing. At its best, Blade & Soul delivers that rare brand of combat that makes me consider learning these moves for real. But it wasn't until Blade & Soul that I encountered the essence of kung fu-at least as far as a keyboard can capture. I've kicked demons in Diablo III, clobbered hydras in Final Fantasy XIV, and unleashed swarms of punches while swigging brews in World of Warcraft. I'm a big fan of monk-style character classes.