If this post looks familiar, it might be because Arsen Nazaryan already reviewed Twin Blades: The Reaping Vanguard for DIYGamer. If all you’ve got is an iPhone, that’s where you want to look. If you’ve got an Xbox 360, you can continue reading.

Twin Blades is about zombies and the nun who hates them. She has to survive 31 days in a zombie-infested town, armed with a scythe and a small arsenal. As the days go on, the zombies get stronger — but so do her weapons.

Gameplay

Twin Blades was originally designed for the button-impaired iPhone, and much of the design carries over in the console version. You’re still limited to two buttons for attack, and they are dead simple. The right trigger shoots and the left trigger swings the scythe. Aside from changing what sidearm you’ve got equipped, and jumping slash, there isn’t much to do.

Zombies claw their way out of the dirt, then amble towards the nun. If they get close, they’ll grab her and gnaw until she shakes them off. Occasionally they lurch forward, swinging their hands or knives or cooking utensils. But overall, they’re pretty easy to avoid. You can jump over their swings or away from their grip, or you can just stay away. These aren’t fast zombies.

You have access to six guns, but you only really need one. The pistol and machine gun are a waste of time. The fire and holy weapons are more useful because they hit every zombie that’s in front of the nun and on the screen with an attack that stuns. The only gun you need is the most powerful, and the most expensive: The holy beam. Using any of the weapons diminishes your energy bar, which has to be filled by using the scythe. So my basic strategy was to use a short beam burst to weaken and stun the zombies in front of me and then finish them off with the scythe.

This strategy is super effective, but has one major failing. It is painfully boring. Holding left while alternating between the right and left triggers isn’t much fun. So I’d take risks, like seeing how long I could go by just using the scythe or trying to gather as many zombies on the screen as I could and killing them with one long beam strike (a lot). Eventually I’d get hit or grabbed and I’d play it safe until I found a health potion. With only two buttons and no combos, the gameplay doesn’t hold up for very long.

This is likely the fault of the Xbox. What worked on the iPhone’s tiny screen doesn’t translate to the bigger screens people hook up to their consoles. On the iPhone, you can only see three or four character widths to the right or left of the nun. On the Xbox, that distance is much larger. So while the art is given more space to breathe, it takes all of the danger out of the game.

When watching a video of the game on an iPhone, I didn’t see many zombies rising out of the ground. They mostly appear self-excavated on the side of the screen. On the Xbox, the opposite is true. They mostly appear as a hand reaching out from the ground, giving you plenty of time to react.

The end result is a game that isn’t much of a challenge, or much fun to play.

Story

There isn’t much here. It’s not clear why the nun keeps running through the same town every day. Nobody seems to live in the town, so I don’t think she’s protecting anyone. And if she’s supposed to be eliminating them, she’s doing a terrible job.

Style

Twin Blade’s gameplay flaws might be forgivable if the game threw a lot of new things at you. Because, as I said above, the art is gorgeous, and I’d play the game just to see what else was animated.

Sure, the game is a bit too heavily influenced by anime perhaps, especially in the sense that many anime emphasize style over substance, but the first thing anybody is going to say about the game is that it looks great. My only complaint in the visual department is that effects are temporary. When I burn a zombie and then cut it up, it would be nice if the zombie bits left behind are a little chared. But that’s a minor issue.

The zombies are pretty diverse. Some wear Hawaiian shirts, others wear pots and pans for defense, and others wield knives. But for all the variety among the zombies, there’s no difference in their attacks. Eventually skeletons show up, but they don’t behave any differently than the zombies.

Press Start and Bulkypix devoted just as much care to the backgrounds as they did to the characters on the screen. The problem here is that they only made three of them. Each day has you running through the same three stages with the same unchanging backgrounds. Again, this is something I’m going to blame on the difference between Xbox and iPhone displays. You see so little of the screen at any one time on the iPhone, that it’s harder to notice that the backgrounds are the same. What I noticed in the first few days might never even be discovered on the iPhone.

Everything Else

As it stands, you can play the 8-minute demo and see just about everything the game has to offer. Press Play are planning to release updates for the game. So far they’ve added additional zombies, but nothing that shakes up the gameplay. The developers are working on an another update:

The update will feature bosses, new environments, a story mode, a mini map to let players chose whichever level suits them best and several NPCs. As we stated previously said update will be free to all of you who have already purchased the game.

Which sounds great. Those things could add a lot that the Xbox version of the game is missing. But right now the game lacks anything to keep me coming back. If the game’s art interests you, and you have the choice of platforms, go with the iPhone.

[DIYgamer was provided with a copy of the game for review purposes. This in no way affected the outcome of the review.]