AeternoBlade Demo Review (First Impressions)

The AeternoBlade demo became available during the early weeks of December, 2013. Here's our quick thoughts about the upcoming 3DS side-scrolling game.

The gameplay pretty much play like a regular Metroidvania game. There are some God of War/Devil May Cry elements in it, just like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate.

AeternoBlade is obviously inspired by games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. There's a time reverse feature that can be activated by doing a round gesture on the touchscreen. The time reverse power can only be used at the expense of some mana which you get by slaying monsters.

The story doesn't seem to be based on any folklore, and doesn't seem to have much originality in it. The game seems to use some good transitioning like "flashbacks", which usually delivers a good "story-telling" experience. This is just based on the demo anyway, we'll see how it goes with the full game. But so far, there isn't anything compelling about the story.

The graphics is very impressive and looks really good in 3D. At the start of the game, everything runs at a very smooth frame rate even with a few enemies on the screen and with 3D on. However, the game showed some noticeable lag once you first encounter the main adversary in the game and some new enemies show up. The frame rate was reduced from like 60fps to 30fps.

The environments are polished and nice to look at. The level design seems to be fine-tuned for stereoscopic 3D. The only annoying thing is that there are a lot of loading times in every section of the level you're in.

There are some RPG elements in the game such as equipping items and upgrading your characters' skills and stats. It's a good sign that AeternoBlade is more than just a hack'n slash game.

The level featured in the demo includes both a sub-boss and a big boss. It's basically the full first stage that is featured in the demo. It's good enough to get a feel of what the full game has to offer.

AeternoBlade does seem promising and seems to be the kind of game we'll be picking up. The game was suppose to come out on January 14th, but a submission failure prompted Corecell to move the release date. Stay tuned for the full review and be sure to grab the demo which is available now on Nintendo eShop.