Mitsurugi Kamui Hakae Review

If the title wasn’t enough to turn you away, then get ready for one of the strangest games you have ever seen! Mitsurugi Kamui Hakae is a combo-style brawler for Xbox One from Zenith Blue that sees Protagonist Misa, the Blade templar fighting wave after wave of Daft Punk rejects in flashy suits and robot helmets. Whilst this description actually sounds fun, the game has its faults, and plenty of them.

The graphics of Mitsurugi Kamui Hakae differ throughout. The character model of Misa is very well done with nice animations and impressive hair physics whilst the environments and enemies look reminiscent of an Xbox 360 game. Lots of the attacks that Misa uses have nice ‘slash’ graphics that add much more flair to your attacks when pulling them off quickly. The cutscenes between Misa and the game’s antagonist are nice but look awkward as they are done In-engine and with little interaction between the two. Enemy variation is also a negative as you are fighting the same looking enemy but with a different coloured suit. Its as if the local Tailor was having a half price sale and these guys took advantage!

Sound is this game’s weakest point. Misa only has 3 attack sounds that she makes every time she attacks, after getting a 100 hit combo I got a little bored of it… The music is extremely generic which is unfortunate as the game would have benefited from a cool soundtrack to fight waves of enemies to. The slash and cut sounds are impactful and fluid which makes the combat a little more satisfying. The voice acting is in Japanese which will appeal to the Anime fans amongst you as it is to a professional level. Even after that though the game still suffers in the sound department with generic and overused sounds.

The gameplay is a love/hate relationship. I love combo brawlers, from Darksiders to God of War but this game does something a little special. There are no combos (as such). You simply string attacks together and they flow nicely into one another. There are three different kinds of attack that can be utilised  but each of them felt very similar but with a different animation. This was nice to look at but made the gameplay stale very quickly. Mitsurugi Kamui Hakae is missing one essential feature that really annoyed me when I started playing it. There is no in-air combat. You can jump but cannot attack whilst doing so. One of the best features from any combo-brawler is taking the fight of the ground but this game is firmly planted on the floor until you unlock a single move that knocks enemies up. After that you have to wait for them to come down, no juggling them helplessly in the air. With there being 3 attack buttons I tried to utilise them all but I found this started to hurt my hand after a while as you are pressing each button quickly but with little effect on the enemies themselves. I saw potential in this game but was sadly let down.

Mitsurugi Kamui Hakae is priced at £9.59 on the Xbox Marketplace which I would say was far too much for a game that is only 212Mb and lacks most of what makes the genre great.

Title was provided for review by Xbox