Overall, Wulverblade is an absolute masterpiece and for people who have been bemoaning the lack of quality beat-em-ups it should provide many hours of meaty combat and carnage. To really enjoy it you’ll need to overcome falling into old habits and committing to learning all of the moves and nuance made available to you. Your reward will be a very viscerally satisfying and overall bloody good time, with some crazy surprises you won’t want to miss out on.
Wulverblade is an absolutely uncompromising fighter game with breathtaking audiovisual and honestly prepared historical assets. Unfortunately, its brutal difficulty is absurdly driven to the extreme by a special movement system. But for true masochists, it's actually a plus.
It's a simple game that has great replayability due to smooth, deep controls and challenging AI opponents. This reminds me of older games that would often challenge you to even get to the last level, let alone beat the final boss, even when you were an experienced player. I cannot recommend this highly enough!
Great great game. Presentation and story's very well cared for, graphics are excellent with several layers of animation and stuff happening in the backgrounds and foreground too (shadows of enemies approaching for example). There are even some historical notes throughout that add that extra layer of interest. Voice acting's ferocious and very well recorded; sound and music are excellent overall. The game is pretty smooth and the animations are good and Handheld mode looks and feels just right. Lots of blood, gore and different ways to kill the hordes. Controls are just fine, I got used to them pretty quick. The game seems to have been made with great passion, and myself as a gamer can appreciate that a lot.
Wulverblade is a blast to play, it looks and runs well, and it has rolling heads and slow motion death kills. It’s colorful yet dark, it’s a game yet it offers an educational aspect. It can feel hard at times, but the checkpoint system helped elevate that most moments. Grab a friend, a joycon, and do some split screen skull bashing because Wulverblade is a fun nostalgia romp and worth the price of admission.
Wulverblade is a welcome return of the beat'em up genre, this time accompanied by a plot that goes far beyond the genre's conventions and a unique art style that makes the game stand out among its peers. Also impossible to miss is its difficulty level, as it's going to destroy the chances of every player who is not skilled and determined enough to lose countless times before finally finishing the game.
Despite the setbacks, I enjoyed romping through Wulverblade’s long levels with hordes of Romans and converted natives to slay in the name of freedom. I appreciated the historical edge the game had to it, even learning a few things without ever being pressured that I was being educated. Even though the controls and balance need refining a fair bit, I still recommend this ultraviolent take on British history.
Overall, Wulverblade is a pretty interesting game with classic action and a heavy helping of history, but it’s also a game that is primarily for hardcore brawler fans who enjoy the pain of control issues and merciless gameplay. If that’s not your cup of tea, you may want to look elsewhere.
If you are a brawler fan or have been at anytime in the past, I highly suggest Wulverblade to you. Its mechanics and controls make it feel so satisfying to play. However, the thing that I love most about the game is that it represents what an ‘indie’ game is. You can tell that it is a passion project with all the love and detail put into it. Its genre is niche and its story is niche. Nevertheless, I think it should be commended that Micheal Heald made the game he wanted to make, regardless of it appealing to a mass audience. What’s incredible is that though the game may not appeal to everyone, it seems to have sold very well on the Switch, so I’m happy for Micheal and Fully Illustrated. Critically, the ending really did disappoint me and thats why I couldn’t give Wulverblade a perfect score.
Fun Beat'em up, that looks fantastic on Switch. I found it a little to hard for my test, but a huge update is on the way, with a new easy mode, and other changes, based on feedback! :) Video on my Youtube: PLAYwithGREGG
A classic brawler with fun, cartoonish, over the top violence. It owes everything to golden era horizontal scrollers like Double Dragon and Golden Axe, and it happily pays homage to those arcade roots. If you're a fan of the genre, then add a couple of points to my score.
I enjoy brawlers, but not so much that I'd play Wulverblade on my own. Like most games of its ilk, however, it's perfect for coop. It's a pity that it only supports two players, which seems to be a missed opportunity.
One mechanic puts the game back, and explains my relatively low score: with two players, you seem to spend most of your time bashing at enemies that are just outside the screen. That problem might disappear with one player, because you can't cover both sides of the screen alone–but in coop, it detracts from the otherwise good action, and looking at your character's butt gets old fast.
We finished Wulverblade on the normal difficulty level in a single night, but fans of the genre will come back to it to improve their scores. Also, the final level has a twist that I won't spoil, and put a smile on our faces.
This is a decent game. The Golden Axe inspiration works really well and there are some accurate pieces of history to learn about along the way.
Sadly, everything else sets the game back. Controls, environments, and enemies need heavy tweaking.
Controls: This should have a customization options, simple as that. Having the attack button (Y) be the same as the pick-up item button is absolutely nonsensical. So when you're fighting a group of enemies and one goes down, there's a high chance you'll pick up their item instead of attacking the remaining baddies. Besides that, the combo system lacks a lot of refinement. Two shoulder buttons are completely wasted on running, you could also run by double-tapping a direction, AND double-tapping is implemented in the combo system. Because of this, the game gets confused as to what you're trying to accomplish, leading to frustrating fights.
Environments and Enemies: Items often drop behind environments and they can't be picked up, besides that the items also expire after a couple of seconds, making this really frustrating to deal with. Enemies also stay hidden either behind environments or worse of all, they attack from **** lamest thing a game in this genre can pull off. The dodge roll is so un-usable and bosses spam unblockable attacks to such an extent, that none of these moves can be pulled off correctly. Boss battles become a game of keep-away.
Devs need to go back to the drawing board with this one.
Pros
+ Vikings setting
+ lovely Visuals
+ decent story presentation
~ decent animations
~ the pricetag (only buy on sale)
Cons
- not optimized for handheld mode (font too small)
- bad font contrast in menu
- character movement feels way too slow in the beginning
- gameplay feels to repetitive (headless-button-spamming)
- only two languages available: english, japanese
~ loading times feel a tad long, for what it is
SummaryHelp Britannia defeat the Romans in Wulverblade — a hardcore side-scrolling beat ’em up inspired by classics such as Golden Axe, Sengoku, and Knights of the Round.