Blades of Time

I came into Blades of Time expecting a throwaway action game and walked away with a complicated opinion. The headline mechanic, rewinding time to spawn spectral clones of protagonist Ayumi, is the kind of idea that sounds gimmicky until it clicks. In combat you choreograph your past self into flanking positions; in puzzles you stack clones onto pressure switches you cannot physically be in two places to trigger. There are moments where that loop genuinely sparks, and those moments are why a 63 Metacritic score feels slightly low. The problem is those moments are surrounded by everything else. The combat outside of the time mechanic is a standard hack-and-slash loop that wears thin fast. Ayumi carries dual swords and can switch to a rifle or machine gun with infinite ammo, but the shooting stance is awkward, camera-breaking stuff that reviewers flagged at launch and nobody patched out. The melee itself is smooth enough, with over 40 unlockable combos and spells you buy with souls dropped by enemies, but the combo variety never translates into meaningful decision-making. You spam what works, time-rewind when things go wrong, repeat across environments that cycle from jungle to snowy valley to floating sky island. The scenery changes; the loop does not. Voice acting is aggressively bad, with Ayumi delivering lines that make you reach for the subtitle toggle within the first twenty minutes. The multiplayer mode, called Outbreak, is a lightweight MOBA setup where two players lead NPC armies to destroy each other's towers and base. On paper that is a decent idea to bolt onto a character-action game. In practice, player counts on PC have always been thin, and finding a live match in 2025 is not something I would count on. The co-op and PvP hooks that might have kept people around at launch never built a community large enough to sustain the mode. If you are buying this for Outbreak, recalibrate. From a pure performance standpoint, the PC version is the most stable version this game has ever had. The framerate holds up on modern hardware in a way the console ports and the later Switch release never managed. Input feel is serviceable with a gamepad; keyboard and mouse are genuinely awkward for a game built around fluid movement and close-quarters melee. If you are on a high-refresh monitor, nothing about Blades of Time will stress your rig, and nothing about it will reward the hardware either. It is a 2012 game that looks like one and plays like one, for better and for worse. If you have already exhausted Darksiders, the older Tomb Raiders, and the lighter end of the spectacle-fighter catalogue and you want something offbeat to fill an afternoon or two, Blades of Time scratches a specific itch. The time-clone mechanic is genuinely underused by action games and seeing it implemented here, even imperfectly, is worth something. Go in with low expectations for narrative, multiplayer population, and gunplay. Go in with moderate expectations for the swordplay and the puzzle design. You will probably land somewhere around satisfied-but-not-converted. Fred, Scout Team