Blades of Brim in IOS

★★★★★

★★★★★ Fun idea, frustrating execution

You know that old cliche about sports fans yelling at the TV whenever the referee makes a call they don’t like? Well, get ready to do a lot of that if you download this game. Blades of Brim is Sybo’s attempt to mix an endless runner game, a genre they’ve already become famous for with Subway Surfers, with elements of a dungeon crawler, complete with enchanted weapons and faceless ogres. The idea is appealing and the gameplay is fun. But the real problem is that they can’t seamlessly combine the dodging obstacles with the combat aspect. For example, in the game you’ll see a thug to your left and swipe that direction to kill it. Easy enough, until you realize that particular thug was standing in front of a bottomless pit. You couldn’t have known because the thug was completely blocking it. You don’t have time to dodge it; you fall in and die instantly. That’s how about half of your games will end. What’s more, the swords can offer some interesting and sometimes kind of helpful passives, but they don’t really do anything game-changing or useful. They’re mostly just aesthetic. Honestly, the game would be ten times better if there were an occasional life-up power up to help alleviate the damage and make taking damage from enemies less dangerous so players can pay more attention to the bottomless pits. But until then, there are better endless runners on the market.

★★★★★ One issue

So, love the game, one issue I hope developers may pay attention to, is how silly it is that epic weapons with certain elemental effects like lightning, stone, ice, knock back enemies that would usually be killed in one hit; like the normal goons and flappers - and they get petrified, iced, or shocked but remain as an obstacle that if you run into them without attacking a second time, will damage you! Ridiculous when you're swinging the Shard of the Thunderlord, a big sword, and it electrifies/stuns an enemy that a common-type sword, and almost every lesser weapon in the game, would kill in one hit. This really takes away from the motivation to buy certain elemental epic weapons or to bother upgrading them. In a quest where the objective is to eliminate an amount of enemies, it's very hard to do with the Shard of the Thunderlord, since you haven't actually killed a great deal of them with one hit when almost any other weapon would. It seems like if this feature is intentional, it takes away from the epicness and functionality of epic weapons and gives preference to elements like arcane and fire... please fix this.

★★★★★ Good game... but...

Let me start this with an “I love this game”. I have played it since it came out and always come back to it every now and then. I used to spend hours playing, and really probably still could. The only complaints I have is the lack of updates and the general uselessness of most armor and weapons. I want to be able to use other armor and different characters but I’m forced to use whatever makes Midas touch last longer and goldthorn to grind coins. Would be cool to be able to transmog like wow does and keep the ability on whoever on whatever equipment. Also, please don’t abandon this game! Out of all the endless runners I’ve played this is definitely the one with the most depth. The gameplay is fast and fun as hell. I’d still recommend downloading and playing if you’re new and reading this review. 5 stars still but listen to my plea.

★★★★★ Revised review

My previous review was 5-star, after spending a few minutes with the game I loved it. Now after a few weeks I have seen the good and bad. The biggest issue I have is that at higher difficulty levels, the enemies become so numerous that it becomes difficult to keep track of where they are, or where they will be once you get past the big enemy or environmental feature that frequently obscures your view of upcoming enemies. This is especially frustrating with the armored enemies who take multiple hits to kill. When attacked, they jump ahead a few steps and must be attacked again. In the higher difficulties, the screen is already filled with enemies, and these armored ones bouncing back create situations where there are too many enemies grouped together and there is no way to avoid getting hit and losing a heart. It makes it hard to justify still playing when you know eventually the game devolves into chaos once you get far enough. Hopefully devs can figure this out because the game is a lot of fun to begin with.

★★★★★ Overall, it's okay.

This is overall another one of those "Endless Running Games". The only thing different from the other apps to me, is that I actually like this game. Now, the one reason (I guess branches off into multiple) that I am not rating this 5 stars, is the Essence. Not the way you get it, that's fine to me, it's the price of stuff you can get from essence. I understand you want players to buy the essence or earn it. However, for those who don't want to waste money on games, it takes a month just to earn enough for the weapon/chest/armor that they want. In the case of chests, you can spend 500 essence in exchange for two times the cost of the "Epic Chest". And if you are like me, trying to get the dragon, you have not got it yet. I have spent about $50 trying to get the dragon from the chest. "Did you?" You might be asking; the answer to that is, I did not. Now, I gave up a few months ago, but was still pretty angry about it. If you could do an event with all the dragons available for a low price, many players would be overjoyed.

★★★★★ Brim Blade Balancing

Amazing game, really good use of the freemium model. I recently acquired the "Blade of Brim", the game's title sword, and was disappointed to find it quite underpowered compared to other late-game weapons. The issue mostly stems from the first two weapon abilities: Even with collecting coins to extend the duration, the two temporary extra hearts won't last past Difficulty 3, which is early game at best for a majority of players. Plus, once the temporary hearts run out, the first two powers vanish, which makes it much worse than MOST other epics. The title sword should be pretty unique. It should be one of the main choices for late game players, since it is, yknow, the name of the game. Maybe the first ability could be something like: "All power ups last an additional X seconds" (Probably around 2 or 3) and the second could be "Double Jump" and the third could be "Wallrun for Coin Magnet". The fourth is fine as it is. The idea here is creating a weapon that exists to naturally buff all elements of gameplay: Powerups, movement, coin collection, and offense. I'd even consider going against the coin magnet upgrade and adding hit protection instead, to coincide with the defensive aspect of the blade's original design. Also it would be cool if you were to add a sort of "head start" element to skip to difficulty 3, because the run speeds in difficulties 1 and 2 are notably slower and the score they give is almost useless for high score runs anyways.

★★★★★ Good Runner with Some Bugs

I typically don’t write reviews for “freemium” phone games, but I thought the devs did a good enough job to warrant one. Aesthetically, this game is top notch. It has a very pleasant art style and everything fits well together. Gameplay is what you expect from an endless runner in that it becomes increasingly difficult as you survive the gauntlet to the point of becoming completely reliant on twitch reflexes in order to overcome obstacles. That being said I did encounter a couple wall glitches where I would either clip through a wall or my character wouldn’t animate when jumping off a wall run. Now as a free game I understand the implementation of ads. For months after I installed the game I would die and be presented with 1-2 ads. No biggie. Recently the ads don’t load after a death and I am no longer able to use blue orbs to revive myself as the button to do so is unresponsive. This results in having to close out of the app and reboot it which on its face isn’t a big deal but once you realize you’ve died “x amount of times” it becomes very tiresome. Overall it’s still a fun game. I never spent a dime and was able to progress at a fairly steady pace. I’d encourage anyone to give it a try even with the “ad bug”, but as for me I need to wait for either an iPhone or in game update to fix the issues I ran into. I haven’t seen anyone else writing about this problem so it might just be me. I’m using a fully updated iPhone 8.