Wulverblade is a beat em up set in the historical Britannia 120 A.D. where you pick one of three characters and fight off the 9th Legion of Rome.
Story:
In Wulverblade you can pick one of three characters, Caradoc, Brennus or Guinevere. One day their tribe is attacked by people who have sided with Romans. The Romans plan on taking their land and you are thrust into a fight with the 9th Legion to save your land and your family.
The story in Wulverblade is very bland and uninspired, but the game used real life historical locations for inspiration and that really helps the story to stay interesting, with notes and videos providing some information on the level you played and how it looked like in real life.
Graphics:
The art style in Wulverblade is really good. The hand drawn animations remind me of a comic book and all the characters and environments look amazing. Each character has some really good animations, even though they are really basic. Not to mention a lot of inspiration, just like the story came from the real life locations.
Enemy designs are varied up until you get to the Romans and once you see them, they recycle all the enemy designs up until the end of the game and even some bosses show up as mini bosses later on, which was rather disappointing.
Audio:
Let’s first talk about the voice acting. Pretty much everyone does a really decent job at voice acting, I didn’t mind it and didn’t think it was bad at any point and in fact thought it was really good in certain moments. I especially loved the narrator. His voice is absolutely perfect and I liked his performance.
The music in this game is also pretty decent. I enjoyed most of the tracks, even though they are rather forgettable in a sense. Pretty much every track in the game is this cliche epic music you hear in seemingly all historical epic movies, TV shows and even video games.
Gameplay:
Wulverblade is a classic Beat’Em’Up game, inspired by the classics such as Golden Axe. There’s literally nothing special in it that changes up the classic formula. As stated before you pick one of three different characters, all of them are pretty much the same apart from slight difference; for example one of them might have a weak attack and fast movement and the other might be a brute but move slowly.
You go through each of the eight levels in the story beating everyone to a pulp and at the end of the level you fight a boss. As you go through the level you can find secret weapons and each weapon will unlock a historical note. When you beat people up your rage mode fills and that’s like a special attack where you get your health back and do more damage.
Playing through the story mode took me around 5 hours to finish, but there’s a bunch of replay value such as trying other characters. Also, there’s an arena mode that is sort of like a survival mode where you fight waves of enemies.
There are however a few problems. The game has a massive difficulty spike in the last two levels of the game and players intending to play through the hardest difficulty needs to prepare to die over and replay levels multiple times until they reach the end.
Verdict:
Wulverblade is a really fun beat’em’up even though it’s nothing new. The combat is fun, the story is decent and it’s pretty much a solid buy if you like Beat’Em’Ups.
Note: The game was reviewed with a code provided by a developer/publisher.
