Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Surprisingly good"

It comes down to this: buy blazblue! Why? There many reasons, but the main and most important one is basically this: Blazblue is awesome and its a great gaming experience.

At a first glance you can tell what this game is about - 2D fighter with 12 characters who carry a weapon in order to destroy the opponents. You might look at this game as the "natural evolution of the Guilty Gear series" (this expression is being used over and over to describe this game), so you can expect great paced combat and lots of combos.

Now, in this quick review i'm going to talk about the basic stuff: characters, graphics, gameplay, online and training mode. If you don't usually play fighting games you'll probably think: "training mode? What the heck?", but a good training mode is the lift one needs to get the combos on the road.

This game has a great character rooster and you will certainly find at least one character you like. Even tough there are only 12 (yes, it's not that much), you can find a vampire girl who can throw lightning frogs at you and controls the wind, a white samurai with an awesome gigantic sword and even a kid who fights along with a soulless doll who uses its claws to beat its opponents to the ground. Each and everyone of these characters are anime style and we're talking about high definition, so if you're an anime lover, you'll "fall in love" with Blazblue's atmosphere. Moving on...

Gameplay! Yes, gameplay! Just thinking about the joy of playing this incredibly fluid and fast game makes me want to stop in time and get my hands in my ps3 controller lol! Well, maybe i'm overreacting, but the gameplay is that good. You can play the classic arcade mode, but you also have a score attack mode (basically a survival mode when you aim to get the best high score possible and top online leaderboards) and a story mode. This game mode is actually pretty fun, since you get to know some characters and their "drive" to fight.

However, all of this wouldn't be great if Blazblue didn't have a great online to match. Well, rejoice people, because Blazblue's online mode is almost flawless. With a good connection, you will experience almost no lag in ranked on online matches, and will be able to combo at will without any problems. There is only two major problems though: quitting a match before it ends won't penalise "chicken" players and everyone seems that only wants to fight stronger opponents - which can make difficult to get online matches sometimes.

And finally, the training mode. Since this is a fighter that relies mostly on combos, a training mode with extensive training options will certainly contribute to perfect one's abilities. For example, you can set the CPU to block every attack after your character's first hit, forcing you to string quick paced combos with no recovering chances to your opponents. Sometimes, you'll find even harder to combo in training mode than agains't real players, because the CPU achieves perfection in recovery timing (something many players don't).

After reading all this, you might actually think "this guy only gave a 9 to this supposedly brilliant game?". If you actually think that, than you are close to the truth. The reason of this 9.0 score is resides mostly on the limited rooster of Blazblue, which may not be very appealing to many players. Even tough this game looks almost made just for me, i have to consider that are many gamers who prefer other fighting series like Soul Calibur or Tekken - for those players, this game may have a greater learning curve.

Nevertheless this is an outstanding game and every gamer who enjoys fighters will definitely enjoy this one.