Blade Of Betrayal Reviewed [Archive]

Philip Colmer

11-21-2003, 06:00 PM

"You are Spencer Corinth, on a personal quest to discover the mystery behind your father's death. Your life is in danger as you fall deep into a chasm of lies and deceit, fueling your quest for personal vengeance." So starts the storyline behind HPT Interactive's Blade of Betrayal. Read on to find out more ... <img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-nov03-boball.gif" /> <!> Blade of Betrayal is an interesting concept. At its most basic, it is a platform game. However, the designers have given the game a well-planned storyline and interspersed the different levels of the game with comic-style scenes that provide you with more of the story. Installation OK - let's get this bit over with - this game is BIG! It requires 10MB of memory and 12MB of storage. As a result, it takes a little while to install - if you've got a storage card I would recommend this is where you install it :) After you've installed the software, you have to navigate down to the Blade of Betrayal folder so that you can run the registration program. Enter the registration code and you are done. You can now start playing. The Opening Scenes As soon as the background music starts playing and the story starts scrolling up, you know that this is going to be just a little bit different from an ordinary platform game. Once the pre-story explanation has finished, you are given the choice of starting a new game, loading a game, changing the game options or exiting. Under the Options menu, you can change the graphics between quality or performance, turn the music and/or the background sounds off and remap the keys that are used for the game. I would recommend that you take some time to read the help file that gets installed with the game. Apart from giving you a heads-up about some of the baddies and monsters you are going to encounter on the various levels, it will also explain some details that might otherwise pass you by, like the meaning of the different difficulty levels and how to identify a checkpoint - allowing you to restart a level at that point if you get killed. Game On! So, you've defined the keys, set the options, read the help file - let's go! The haunting background music starts up and the first comic strip gives you a bit more story. These strips appear between each level. If you've seen the strip before, you can just click on "Done", otherwise you can click on "next" or "prev" to step through the action. An example of the strip is shown in Figure 1. <img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-nov03-bobcomic.gif" /> Figure 1: Part of the story being told The game consists of five chapters with three levels within each chapter. The last level of each chapter is a one-on-one fight with a different baddie each time, and one who is harder to beat each time. Once you are into the game "proper", it is fairly straightforward: find all of the special items, kill all the baddies and get to the end of the level. Life isn't really that easy, though, is it? :-) For a start, you can only see a small part of the level on the screen, so you've got to decide whether you need to go to the left or the right and, if you find a rope or a ladder, do you go up or down? Some of those choices will lead you to more special items or a life recharge ... and some of them will lead you to more baddies :-) The graphics are superb, with the background parallax-scrolling (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scroll">definition</a>) behind the foreground giving a greater sense of depth to the game. The lower portion of the screen (as can be seen in Figure 2) shows your health (red bars), the amount of energy for the special weapon (green bars), the special weapons available to you, how many lives you've got left and then, finally, buttons to turn on/off the health display above your head and the display of the score, plus buttons to bring up the menu, attack and jump. The last two buttons were gratefully received when playing this on my darn iPAQ which doesn't let me press to application buttons at the same time :evil: <img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/colmer-nov03-bobgame.gif" /> Figure 2: Playing the game In addition to the health and energy items, each level contains a number of treasure items - some of which are hidden away and need to be searched out. Missing a treasure item doesn't mean that you can't finish the level, but it does mean you won't get to see a special comic strip at the end of the game. Gotchas The only thing I am a bit unhappy about is the user interface for setting the controls. The problem is that when you press one of the application keys, the software just displays "OEM" - regardless of which button you've pressed. Now, I realise that different manufacturers decide to include different buttons on their devices but the software could number them so that you've got some chance of telling them apart. Where To Buy The software can be <a href="http://www.handango.com/brainstore/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=311&productId=83816">downloaded from Handango</a> or purchased for $12.95 (affiliate link). The demo includes the first four sections of the game. Specifications The software will run on a Pocket PC 2000, 2002 or Windows Mobile 2003 device. If you are using a Pocket PC 2000 device, a patch from Microsoft is required to install an additional DLL and HPT. 10MB memory and 12MB of storage are required and the game will run from a storage card. Conclusions I enjoyed playing this game - I like the graphics and the added depth to the game that the story gives to it. Although it can be argued that once you've arrived at the end, you've played the game. But, there are different difficulty levels and you've got to find all of the treasure if you want to see the special closing comic strip.