Look, I want to like Bladestorm. Cool looking medieval mercs battling in a Dynasty Warriors esque heroic retelling of the Hundred Years War? Black Prince vs Joan of Arc? Sign me up for that.
But it's awful. It's just terrible. First, you don't actually fight, you pick up squadrons of troops standing around as though they were dropped beat-em-up weapons and then you lead your 20-30 pack of medieval mans on an overlong boring march across a lovely but empty France war sandbox to a fort where you walk up to the two squads in it and hold your auto-attack button until they die and you capture the fort. There is no action combat component. There is no strategy component at all. You simply grab your 30 swordsmen, knights, lady fencers, vikings, landsknechts, whatever is on tap and march them to the goal on boring 5 minute long slow walks across empty terrain to the next objective. There is no scripting to help this either; the scripting more often makes it worse because now thanks to the pincer attack or whatever now you gotta turn around and hike BACK to fight another two squads. You have some cooldown abilities, including a shield block in some squads which I DO NOT understand because enemies don't have predictable attack patterns that you could skillfully block, especially at a 60 man battle scale. I have no clue what Koei was going for here. I suspect they wanted the visceral impact of 30 medieval mans fighting another 30 medieval mans all in one big brawl and rarely, when the RPG stat differences aren't so pronounced, they succeed. But this is so rare and such a small part of the experience compared to the horrible boring walking. There is a slight pretense at strategy where some squads are strong or weak against other squads but all that amounts to is you either overlevel one squad so much you can ignore it or if you see a squad you can only do chip damage to, you either have to hike back to a camp and look for something that has advantage or deploy a squad from your equipment inventory and switch to it. Having to play rock paper scissors is not a substitute for strategy, much to the dismay of Fire Emblem fans, sorry.
It's a shame the gameplay is so utterly atrocious as everything else is really cool. You're a mercenary and randomly take jobs fighting for either side of the war and so end up seeing all sorts of Koei style melodramatic and cool portrayals of historical characters with all the elevated drama and tragedy Koei usually writes in in an era of gaming rarely portrayed. The character designs are all cool. You hang out in a stylish tavern with all the other mercenaries, you can see castles, graveyards, farms, cities, etc all over the big open world battle map, it's all very cool and has the sort of atmosphere I rather wish Mount and Blade would have even tried to have in its awful non-combat parts. The graphics may be Xbox 360 era in quality but I still find that style charming and pleasant. The soundtrack is beautiful too. While the main game is random fights on the same map over and over, the Nightmare story is a series of much longer (And thus with considerably more pointless walking) linear scripted missions to tell a story of monsters attacking France and all the characters from the main story banding together. Again, wonderfully over the top and dumb, precisely the sort of story I love, but again completely unplayable because the missions last longer than entire runs of better arcade games with only a fraction of this actual fighting.
I don't really care about the presentation and style and music if your game plays like garbage and unfortunately Bladestorm is just awful to play. Given how much I love the setting and art, I would LOVE to come up with any sort of excuse for someone curious about this to recommend this game to some niche crowd, but I have absolutely no idea who this game is for or what sort of person might want to subject themselves to this. Stay away and just play as Joan of Arc in WO4U.
