I was initially excited to play Die By The Blade because it reminded me a bit of Bushido Blade—the Square-published sword fighting game from 1997. Back in those days, when most fighting games were over-the-top slugfests like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and, of course, Killer Instinct, the idea of a game where getting hit with a sword approached something near realism blew our minds out of our skulls.
And as an enthusiast for the art of Bushido, I really like the concept of a game that utilizes tight, precise movements and a combination of skill and wits to outdo your opponent. However, this isn’t that—Die By The Blade is a good idea for a game, but executed in a less-than-stellar way that makes it more frustrating than fun to experience.
I think I need to say this up-front: in a post-Street Fighter 6 gaming world, there really isn’t any excuse for games not to offer simplified yet nuanced controls, allowing players to expand options as they learn and progress. Now, where Die By The Blade was in its development cycle relative to SF6’s release is a whole other debate, but I felt it important to outline my perspective when approaching this game—or, in fact, all others.
Die By The Blade prides itself on its distinct mechanics and controls, but I believe Street Fighter 6 has proven you can have options without sacrificing the core feel of your game. To this end, Die By The Blade presented me with a persistent problem: its controls and mechanics never feel satisfying because they’re initially abrasive and hampered by jank.
“Die By The Blade is a good idea for a game, but executed in a less-than-stellar way that makes it more frustrating than fun to experience.”
Now, I don’t think it’s an outrageous idea that most players, inexperienced or not, approach a fighting game in the same way: jump straight into the versus mode to get an idea of how the game is played before going into the story/campaign mode—which usually scales difficulty allowing you to get a better feel for the game—and then diving into the training to further refine your skills by practicing moves and combos. However, because the nature of this game’s controls is so specific, this approach swiftly led to wrestling with the game’s mechanics and swift defeats, which soured my mood for the game considerably.
If you’re remotely familiar with my writing, you’ll know I typically start my criticisms with an analysis of the game’s story. And I really wish I could do that here, but there isn’t one, and that was extremely disappointing. I don’t fully understand how a game about high-stakes sword fighting couldn’t be bothered to contrive a story mode, which not only could have served to add context and personality to both the game and its characters but also slowly introduced players to its mechanics in a meaningful way.
Instead, players are encouraged to learn the game’s mechanics through its tutorial mode, but even this suffers from some prohibitive design. Ideally, a game with such an incredibly specific style of gameplay would begin with a tutorial so players learn right away how to play it. But this game’s tutorial is hidden within the single-player menu tab—which is after the Versus, Online, and Customize tabs.
It’s just somewhat bizarre to me since the game begins almost prompting the payer to jump straight into versus, but doing so essentially sends them to their doom against AI opponents who actually know the controls and will just kill them immediately. Learning how to play is almost optional—except it really isn’t if you want to enjoy the game.
“Die By The Blade presented me with a persistent problem: its controls and mechanics never feel satisfying because they’re initially abrasive and hampered by jank.”
I’ve been complaining about the controls for a while now without really explaining them because I wanted to try to convey my experience when jumping into Die By The Blade. But even when you understand them, the game’s controls are a diabolical combination of clunky, somewhat unresponsive, and, a lot of the time, wildly unpredictable.
In theory, the core idea of the combat isn’t terrible. It utilizes a system similar to For Honor, where players take a stance—either low, medium, or high—and try to match their opponent’s attacks, waiting for an opening to deal the killing blow. Matching an opponent’s stance will naturally block their attacks, so theoretically, players really need to be on the ball with their blocks and parries in order to spot an opening or put their opponent off balance for a killing blow.
Unfortunately, in practice, this is not the result as fights become a sloppy, aggravating affair of snap-animations, blocks that don’t seem to work and terrible hit detection that, because of the game’s one-hit kill mechanic, results in instant death if a sword so much as grazes you. I’ve played countless games, and I can honestly say little if nothing about the controls makes sense.
Defending feels completely unpredictable since changing your stance is slow and somewhat unresponsive. You can parry no matter your direction, but it doesn’t seem to matter as it blows your opponent so far back that closing the distance is a chore, and they can snap right back into an attack before you have time to blink, and suddenly, you’ve lost the fight.
Furthermore, even the act of swinging your sword feels unwieldy and unsatisfying. There’s a peculiar delay between hitting the attack button and when the animation plays that makes timing your attacks feel off—something that doesn’t seem to affect AI opponents. And the way you do combos is just bizarre. Every stance has two “Sequences” that can be performed, requiring a combination of stance direction and player movement.
The problem with this is that performing combos is tied to a stamina meter that depletes every time you swing, block, dodge or are parried. If you don’t have enough stamina, you can’t perform a combo, and if you try in the heat of a fight, you’ll end up repeating the same snap animation, leaving yourself wide open for an attack.
What’s worse, if players are hit by the final move in a sequence, it results in a big flourish kill that plays out in an animated cutscene. There is no way to do this outside of executing a combo, so players are incentivized to put distance between themselves and their opponent—the tutorial basically says as much—and try to perform a combo in the hopes of hitting their opponent with the last attack as they try to read your moves and defend accordingly.
Since this was a review copy, playing online against other humans wasn’t really an option—except for one random fight I got into, but I’ll get into that in a second—so the majority of fights you’ll participate in is against AI opponents who seem wildly better equipped to deal with you than another human might be. However, it was playing against the AI that I started to notice another issue with the game’s design that could have been accounted for and developed around.
“In both the visual and audio departments, Die By The Blade isn’t particularly remarkable.”
Everything about Die By The Blade’s combat seems to incentivize and prioritize overtly defensive play. It became apparent every time I tried to engage an AI opponent the way the game wanted to be played, only to be killed by a robotic opponent who could defend faster than I could think. However, when I started putting incredible distance between my opponent and waiting for cheap openings I could exploit, then the game became remarkably easy to win.
Returning to the aforementioned online opponent, this was their strategy as well. As the fight started, they put as much distance between me and them as possible and waited for me to come to them—spamming a combo in the hopes of hitting me with the finisher. Now, even in SF6, playing overtly defensive and goading your opponent into attacking is a strategy, but that game has a lot more options for approaching anyone playing this way, making it much more balanced.
But Die By The Blade’s one-hit-kill system makes putting distance between you and your enemy the only strategy since going on the offensive and potentially leaving yourself vulnerable to an insta-kill just isn’t effective. With a game that almost incentivizes playing defensively, it should have built itself around that mechanic.
“Everything about Die By The Blade’s combat seems to incentivize and prioritize overtly defensive play.”
If the game implemented a Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice stance system, where players needed to be put off balance in order for a one-hit kill, it would have made the gameplay more intense and satisfying. Instead, what Die By The Blade has done is distill the way people try to glitch behind each other for cheap backstabs in Dark Souls’ PVP into a full game, and it’s just not fun.
In a fighting game, every move needs to be thought out to a certain degree—how to attack, defend, when to approach and when to back off. What you have here is a game where it feels like nothing you do matters, and there’s no way to really approach the combat, particularly against the AI and especially against humans who will just walk to the back of the map and wait for you to come to them.
In both the visual and audio departments, Die By The Blade isn’t particularly remarkable. Almost every arena utilizes a fairly basic Asian-inspired aesthetic, and all its characters look like stock Unity models, with none possessing any memorable characteristics or outfits. Music is equally uninspired.
If Die By The Blade was only going to do one thing, it needed to do it right. And by all accounts, I can’t see how it does. Its gameplay is monotonous and unreliable, and its one-hit-kill system makes the game more frustrating than tense. A good fighting game should be both fun and exciting, even when you lose, and this game, no matter the outcome, is never fun.
