Good time killer, but not much else
While dusting, I came across this on my room mates shelf. Being a fan of omega's games and a fair strategy nut, I popped it in, expecting to slog through a small cities population while barely staining my mail hauberk. However, bladestorm takes an interesting middle ground between the 3-rd person slaughterfest of Dynasty Warriors and the nearly completely hands off approach of Rot3K.

Bladestorm puts you in the role of mercenary officer No. 5, a sellsword who works for the British and French in turns on various fields throughout the Hundred Years War. A nice cast of significant figures make periodic appearances and are voiced decently, from the Black Prince to Joan of Arc.

Advancing isn't a level by level thing, but rather a practice with spears, improve spears techniques and spear unit leadership skills. Points aren't automatically awarded, and you have a fair amount of control over the improvement of unit abilities (I personally ramped Calvary Charge up to max first thing, and thereby turned my horse line into a tank blitzkreg) The weapons are incredibly well balanced, and a wrong strategic step can quickly see your men slaughtered like lambs. Yuo also can't do the one man army approach thats so tempting from DW either, for similar reasons. Theres some strategic involvement, but primarily you fight from the fore, as to be expected.

The sad part of this is you feel like an extra in a movie, rather than a named character, much less a main one. You almost don't have control over yourself, and its easy to lose track of you among the throng, and suddenly find yourself surrounded, all your men dead and you at half health. You have no lines and no involved cutscenes, and you even get your thank-you lines in battle. The story crawls along, shackled wrist to ankle. After nearly 10 hours of play, I've run maybe 5-6 10-15 minute story missions, and had little direct involvement otherwise. To put in DW terms, you play free play ten times before playing a story mission. The story also doesn't seem to go anywhere. You can't exclusively fight for Britain or France it seems, as you need to play French missions to unlock further British ones, and vice versa.

This is a great game to keep on your shelf, but I couldn't sit through this start to finish if I was paid. I'll pull it off and sack some villages every month or so, and grin wickedly while doing it, but I can't follow it with the same kind of dedication I've felt for Dynasty Warriors. It was a nice new idea Koei, but it definitely won't take over as the best one.

This game will require a time committment
KOEI gets a bad rap in my opinion. Sure they tend to produce button mashers that are a little weak on story or they simply try to repackage concepts over and over, but that can be good at times. Bladestorm doesn't really fit that mold. Set during the Hundred years war, this is a game that is long and takes a little bit to get into. The controls are different and take some getting used to and after awhile you end up either liberating or ransacking the same cities multiple (and I do mean multiple) times. But, once you get into the game it is pretty fun. It involves some strategy, but not in the tradtional "you move then I move" sense. Worth the time. Just don't expect to finish it in a week. Maybe not even in a month.

Not bad...
...but it could have been a lot better. I really wanted to like this game, but so much is stacked against the player that the frustration outweighs the fun.

The minimap is horrid. Finding where you are and where you are supposed to be once you are on the battlefield is very difficult. Also, finding more of your troops if you are cut off can be impossible. (Several times, I lost my unit and was unable to find another group to take command of.)

Enemy commanders will not die without extreme effort. I ran several over with a horse, but they got back up with near complete health.

Enemy units that you have almost no chance against (either because of level or weapon differences) cover the battlefield.

Great game
This a a good game, provides hours of entertainment. Is a good alt from the normal game from this company.

Nothing out there like it.
Really, it's the gameplay that immersed me. Because of the free mission system, you have a lot of leeway as to how you approach any given fight. But you're always guaranteed a tense and action-packed experience. Stopping cavalry charges with a wall of pikes, protecting siege weapons against Viking axemen, ambushing crossbowmen with assassins, or pulling out my longsword for some solo hacking in a pinch, all for riches and renown. It's truly one-of-a-kind. Very easy to pick up and play, but takes both quick and deep thinking to master all its challenges.

The strategy is simple at first but gets deeper as the game progresses and more unit types are introduced. And there are a whole lot of units, from all over the Old World, not just Europe. We're talking Mongol horsebowmen, Abyssinian scythe-swords, Japanese samurai cavalry, Touareg spearmen, and more. That's not historically accurate, but that's Omega Force's brand of historical fiction, and it adds depth to the strategy. You get to command all these different units, switching between them on the fly in the thick of battle. I actually like how the game forces you to work with your allied units; it's pretty much impossible to win battles on your own, unlike Dynasty Warriors and most other battlefield action games. The AI holds up well enough to facilitate teamwork and keep throwing challenges at you in critical moments. Speaking of teamwork, multiplayer would have been cool but isn't there. The other notable weakness in the game is when it occasionally has you trekking across the battlefield to get to far-flung objectives, which gets boring quickly.

The graphics and presentation are conservative but they get the job done of putting you in the milieu. Story characters are archetypal but cool enough to rally behind (and equally as cool to beat down. How you like being stuck on the end of my pike, Prince Eddie?) Also, parents need not worry about kid-unfriendly content. The game is quite clean, despite descriptions of "visceral" fighting and "foul-mouthed" characters. All in all, it's a unique and worthwile experience for gamers of all kinds.