Let's play: Blade Craft beta, a new Chinese hack-and-slash MMO

On Thursday, Chinese game developer and publisher Ejoy cracked open a worldwide beta for its new game Blade Craft (狂刃). Blade Craft is a hack-and-slash action MMO, and while you can check it out for yourself by downloading the beta here if you can read Chinese, we thought we’d give it a play through and let you know whether or not its worth your time. Check out our Let’s Play video for Blade Craft:

Blade Craft kicks off with a decent character selection screen, on which you can pick one of three classes, make your character either male or female, and mess with their face, hair, and skin color. It’s not the deepest character editor ever, but it definitely allows for a little bit of customization, which is nice.

The game itself features a story that lost my attention pretty much immediately. Like any MMO, really, you’ll run into new NPCs to get quests and items, and then work your way through levels killing off bad guys to acquire loot, complete quests, and level up. Blade Craft calls itself a 2.5D game, and that’s pretty accurate. It’s basically a 3D side-scrolling brawler. You’ll have a little space to move back and forth, but not much, and you’re more or less always headed on one direction.

The combat in Blade Craft is fun at first and it looks sharp, but ultimately it’s a bit too simple to hold your attention for long periods of time. You’ll start with one basic attack and two special attacks on recharge timers, but to be honest at least in the first half hour of the game, everything but the arrow keys and the attack key are completely superfluous. I’m fairly certain you could get to at least level 10 in the game without ever using a special attack. And since you’re fighting a lot of the same enemies in pretty similar looking places early on in the game, this gets pretty boring. Get quest, go to level, mash attack button, collect rewards. Repeat.

Blade Craft looks and sounds pretty sharp for a Chinese game that’s free, just entered open beta, and is only 1 GB in size. It’s clearly not designed to run at HD resolutions — when I played it at 1920×1080 some of the onscreen messages appeared pixellated — but unless you’re a graphics freak, you’ll find it looks pretty nice. I expecially liked the sword animations for the warrior character, which you can see in the video above. The combat may not feel very satisfying, but it definitely looks pretty cool.

Should you play Blade Craft? Right now, unless you’re a huge fan of Chinese hack-and-slash games, I’d say no. It’s just too boring and repetitive early on, and while I’m sure the combat gets deeper later in the game, you’ll likely be bored to tears by the time you get there. That said, it’s definitely a game to keep an eye on. This is just a beta, after all, and if Ejoy can make the combat a bit deeper (perhaps by adding light/heavy or high/low attack options like many fighters and brawlers do) I think it could definitely be worth your time.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for something new to get excited about, check out the 5 most exciting Korean games in development right now.