TITLE: BlazBlue: Continuum Shift
PLATFORM: 360, PS3
DEVELOPER: Arc System Works
PUBLISHER: Aksys Games
ESRB: T
RELEASED: July 27

By Cameron Miller
Staff Writer, Crowd Control

The Continuum Shift has begun.

BlazBlue is back with more of the intense fighting action you’ve come to expect. With the amazing anime-like sprites and spectacular 3D stages, the visuals in this game will blow your mind. Combine the visuals with its unique gameplay and great music and you get one hell of a game. The sequel to BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, it has all the features from the first game and more.

BlazBlue has 14 unique characters to play with such as Ragna the Bloodedge and Iron Tager. Each of them has their own stories to play through. In fact, each character has multiple endings in story mode, just begging you too see them. How to see those depends on who you beat and who you lose to. With plenty of actual story to the game as well, you will easily want to play through all the characters to get a full grasp of the complete story.

Image from strategyinformer.com.

As far as controls go, there are four different attacks light, medium, hard and drive. You will have to learn what attacks work good in combos together to be a worthwhile fighter because the combos are what separate the good players from the bad. While you learn to combo you will also learn how to cancel certain attacks and make combos go on longer than allowed. The fighting is very smooth and seems pretty balanced, as I have seen great players with all characters. Depending on the time you want to spend with the game you can easily pick it up and enjoy it or go in deeper and learn to be the best with any fighter.

Continuum Shift offers plenty of different play modes, 11 to be exact. The tutorial mode teaches new payers to the world of BlazBlue and explains how to play as well as how to be fight well. This was a great feature in my opinion because I am new to the series and it was nice to have a fighting game show me what is going on for a change. There is arcade mode which I’m sure most people are familiar with. You pick a character and battle till the end of a certain amount of matches, classic and satisfying. Versus mode, of course, pits the player against either the computer or a friend for some fun competition. Score Attack is where the player can fight against the computer and compete on the leader boards to be the top cheese—not an easy task, I assure you.

Image from strategyinformer.com.

A new and fun mode is Legion, where the player goes around a ‘map’ and fights characters and when they are defeated, they can join his army to fight larger groups of enemies. I say ‘map’ because the game calls it a map, when it is really just circles connected by lines set-up in different formations. It is a fun way to fight multiple computer-controlled characters at once with your own army. Featuring three different difficulties; easy, normal, and hard, each of the maps is much more elaborate as the difficulty goes up.

There is also Challenge, great for learning the much more complex combos for any character you choose. This is really the place you should spend most of your time if you plan on being pro. Gallery is where you can listen to the games music, watch some videos and look at a lot of other things in the game that you have enjoyed while playing, as well as some concept art. The Replay Theatre is where you can save and view matches that you have played online against other players. Last but certainly not least, Network is where you fight online to prove that you have got the goods to beat everyone else. Online is highly competitive and you will certainly meet some great players who know this game like the back of their hand.

Image from strategyinformer.com.

Overall, this is a great game. It has all the makings of an excellent fighting game; gameplay, visuals and music. The story was a little harder for me to follow due to this being a sequel but the game was still very enjoyable and helped me get some of my fighting spirit out. I’m not sure if it was the fact that I didn’t the first game or the fact that fighting games never have a great story to them, but I never really get my hopes up for a story to blow my mind from fighting games. The online worked very well, with hardly any lag. I enjoyed BlazBlue: Continuum Shift a lot and if you enjoy fighting games you will too. If you put forth the time you can definitely be successful.

RATING: 8/10

Front page image from strategyinformer.com.