Thank You Ultimate Games for providing us with a review code!

Broken Blades’ concept is rather interesting. Not the whole dungeon crawling aspect as that has already been done hundreds of times—but the fact that your blade is highly customizable from the various shards that you’ll collect from treasure and enemies. Unfortunately, this decent idea is hampered by numerous flaws in regard to gameplay.

After selecting a difficulty and the following tutorial, the experience throws you right in with only a tiny little blade and your wits. There is no map, nor a sense of direction. I rather like this approach as spelunking into the unknown should feel mysterious at first. Broken Blades is a 2D action-”roguelite” with a simple cartoon style. Whether you choose easy or hard, you only have one life to beat the game. Now as for why I put roguelite in quotations is that it both is and isn't. Certain aspects carry over in future playthroughs like many in the genre. There is some procedural generation and every death is permanent, but the first level is always the same design with the same placement of enemies.

Perks typically are chosen from a list of two (or three after a certain point is reached in a playthrough). They can range from various things such as granting immunity to spikes or increased damage against certain enemies. The issue with perks is that there is no list or menu to show what perks you've obtained, and perks do not stack (or at least stack very minimally). Unless you remember every single perk you acquired, you will most likely accidentally choose the same ones multiple times or even be forced to do so. Some perks are also very vague as they are hard to know what they do, and due to permadeath, there is little opportunity to experiment.

Now with sword pieces, various different pieces can be found and you can equip up to five at a time. Depending on how many pieces you have, they change the properties of the sword. Having zero or one piece makes your sword strike fast and quick but has barely any range. Two to three pieces turn your sword into a slower swing but now with an arc covering more area. Stacking four to five pieces is the largest sword with the best range, but it swings very slowly. Combined with the fact that you can and often will have the animation interrupted due to either simply changing direction in the air or getting hit by an enemy, it makes the large sword the worst. Also, to be frank, combat is genuinely terrible before you get a few sword pieces under your belt due to the stubby range and janky hitboxes of the short sword. The execution of the main gimmick fails in practice to the imbalance of each sword variation.

Further into imbalance, the abilities of the swords can mostly be underwhelming. By far the best one is the vampiric sword piece as it heals you for every hit, allowing you to effectively face tank every boss in the game even on hard with certain perks. I found myself dying a lot and often until I unlocked that piece for subsequent playthroughs. The game is rather hard up until that point with a poor field-of-view leading to cheap shots, and bosses with extremely subtle tells compared to standard enemies. Sensitive controls also add to the difficulty as the slightest degree of your control stick or D-pad can have you fall through platforms when you clearly do not want to.

Music and sounds mostly consist of one main theme, a few SFX from enemies, and a pretty good final boss theme. Sometimes the music can cut out when transitioning from one level to another. The final boss theme consists of numerous instruments used in rock and has a rather intense feeling—easily being the more positive and memorable aspect of Broken Blades.

In regard to morality, there are aspects to be noted. Violence is all cartoonish in nature and simple. Language is a bit more drastic and crude. The main guy, before obtaining a specific ability like to say “I’d rather sh*t my pants than go in there” when attempting to enter a small tunnel. Magic usage is by some of the enemies such as the two pig bosses you’ll fight, and your sword can sometimes use magic with lightning bolts, ice, and shadow clones.

Broken Blades does become slightly better when you put in the time, but the high difficulty whether on easy or hard, the extremely abrupt ending that seems like it’s leading to another level, and the overreliance on obtaining certain perks and sword pieces will turn most people away. Despite the cheap price range and not being too bad morally, there just isn’t much to it that makes it worth playing. As much as it hurts to say, I only stuck through with it further than a single completed run for the sake of the review and this aspect hit me when I was whaling away at the sponge of a final boss for nearly 10 minutes. The concept is there, but like the blade at the beginning, is fragmented and broken.