Naraka Bladepoint Review: A Double-Edged Battle Royale

The battle royale genre is rather established nowadays with household names like Fortnite and Apex Legends dominating most Twitch channels. For a new game to stand out among the crowd, it needs to offer something the others don’t. So here it is - Naraka.

The review is based on the PC version.

Focusing on melee attacks and foregoing the ubiquitous shotguns and pistols of other games in the genre, Naraka: Bladepoint doesn’t feel like your typical battle royale but it does fall into the usual format, offering the good and the bad but still feeling like a fresh take on a familiar genre.

Loot, prepare, and survive

The objective of any round is to survive and understand your surroundings enough to ensure you or your team of three come out on top. Each time you start, your character begins with nothing on them so you need to search glowing troves to build your inventory with various weapon styles, equipment and health restores, and even temporary armor.

PROS:

Fluid movement makes you feel like you’re in a Chinese martial arts movie;
Robust customization features during and outside of battle;
Deep combat system and weapon choices;
Gorgeous, unique environments.

CONS:

Combat loses its elegance in group settings;
One badly timed hit can quickly end your life.

As more players get killed off, the smaller the playing field will become as a poisonous haze begins circling the island causing all players to congregate in one central location. Until this happens, you can explore your environment and take on small quests like praying at statues, finding keys to secret stashes, or even looting rare hordes to find better weapons or upgrades in preparation for those final moments of battle.

Souljades, for example, are items that can be equipped to further customize various effects of your experience such as improving your offense and defense or providing you with special buffs when attacking or moving. You can stack together multiple of your desired effect as you find them, or purchase some from the in-game merchant with money you get for defeating foes per round.

Your first few matches online following some tutorials will be with bots, but soon enough you will feel how intense some matches can become keeping you on your toes at all times. You will need to keep one eye on your surroundings and one eye on your inventory to ensure your weapons are in good condition or that you take time to heal yourself after a battle. Combined with the various types of weapons you will find, each round will feel different from the next forcing you to improvise as you go or hunt down the items you want for the playstyle of your liking.

Melee mastery

Long-range weapons like bows and cannons are also helpful under certain situations, but they don’t stand a chance against the quick strike of a blade. In fact, Naraka features a simple yet hard-to-master combat system that rewards well-timed attacks and punishes those who simply mash buttons and hope to land a hit – at least, that’s its intention. Combat consists of light and charge attacks, parries, jumps, and slides that make for a very fluid experience. Think rock-paper-scissors mixed with a bit of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

Charge attacks beat light attacks, light attacks beat parries, and parries beat charge attacks. The idea is to mix your attacks with different hits to keep your enemies guessing. You can even cancel your attacks mid-way to trick your opponent who may be expecting to parry you. Sword fighting feels it does in a Ninja Gaiden or Nioh game in all the best ways possible and will constantly keep you on your toes guessing what kind of move your enemy will pull off.

Most of the time, however, it’s hard to say combat rewards skill. A lot of your attacks will sometimes rely on reading your opponent, but they can also be up to chance or be muddled due to the number of opponents all fighting at once. Remember that this is a battle royale game so there will be dozens of other players all trying to kill you. If your duel is intercepted by a third or fourth player, all that fancy mind-reading will prove futile after you get assaulted from all sides. When it comes down to it, combat works and feels amazing when it’s just you and someone else – a classic duel of timing and perception.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Blade

What helps the game feel like a Chinese martial arts movie is also how fluid movement feels as soon as a match starts. Even outside of combat, your character can seamlessly climb any surface and even hook-shot their way to higher heights either for exploration or to get closer to an enemy. One of my favorite past-times while playing was scaling a building and waiting silently until a foe approached leading to some intense roof-top battles.

Climbing high also lets you breath in all the splendor around you and and realize Naraka is a very pretty game. Rounds take place on a remote island bathed in an Asian aesthetic whose landscape will range from poisoned swamps to dusty mines to massive fields that look gorgeous under the setting sun. There’s not a lot of music that plays once a battle starts though and you will often feel alone until you run into someone trying to kill you, but the soundtrack you hear in the menus makes you feel like you are embarking on an epic adventure.

Improvise and customize

With seven players to choose from, Naraka also gives you plenty of options to choose your preferred playing style. The point of every round is to survive, but each character has his or her own unique special and ultimate ability that make them feel very different in battle such as a defensive monk, a healer, or a wind-wielding warrior. Not only do you have to master its universal combat controls, but you also need to know what abilities to call on at a moment’s notice.

These characters can also be customized even further, allowing you to alter their appearance through unlockable costumes, facial modifications, and even hairstyles. Even their abilities can be slightly altered, allowing you play as your favorite character but molding him or her even more to your liking. It’s one of the game’s most generous features despite needing asking you to dish out real money to unlock most things up-front.

And, yes – it wouldn’t be a battle royale without microtransactions, but the good thing here is that what you can buy with real money is merely aesthetic. There is no pay-to-win scheme here. Most items, with the exclusion of rare goodies you can only get by dishing out cash, can also be purchased with the in-game coins you get for playing matches so it motivates you to keep playing to unlock what you want.

With daily challenges and quests that reward you the more you play, Naraka: Bladepoint is shaping up to be game that plans for set up shop and last for a while. No two rounds feel the same, and yet the familiarity of each one makes it easy to keep coming back for more. It’s not perfect, by any means, with its combat system offering a breath of fresh air but also leading to moments of frustration. Still, its emphasis on customization, melee combat, and some robust features turn it into one battle royale experience worth checking out.