Forbidden Arms --- Ryview #2

Welcome to Ryview #2 - Forbidden Arms, by GodSeeD Studios

I'm not particularly familiar with the "ninja" genre, but this game looked promising. I must give it a resounding "meh".

There is a pretty exciting opening narrative, but it really is very unimportant to the gameplay, and lasted waaay too long.

It really is a very straightforward game. You can a blood lust meter that you must keep filled, or you will slowly lose health. You fill it by hitting and killing enemies. So keep killing, simple enough.

You also drain that blood lust meter with special moves. I like that feature because, just like I mentioned in my gemcraft article, when you have to balance life (or essentially life) and strong moves, powerups, etc, it really helps create a new level of strategy.

Unfortunately, the game is pretty much the same thing over and over. It's a sidescrolling hack and slash type game, lots of sword swinging, lots of killing, not much there. There are a few different game modes, but they still boil down to the same thing. Kill people to stay alive, and then you either do that until you kill a certain number, or do it for a certain length of time, or run a certain distance (which still involves just surviving until the end, very similar to the length of time mode).

The upgrades are a pretty good feature. Navigating the upgrade screen is a little difficult, as there are 3 different categories, then some pretty confusing titles. You have to read the description to find out what it does. I mean, really the description should have specifics, but the title should at least have some info, or make the description bigger, or something, I don't know, it seems more difficult to understand than it needs to be.

And there is some level of ryplayability, as it posts stats for each level, and you may want to grind to upgrade, but I certainly don't want to put up with the same straightforward mechanic over and over and over.


I usually love any game with upgrades, but this game just doesn't excite me. Too repetitive, not really worth seeing the upgrades reach their full potential.

So, here's the scorecard

Category	Score
Time Value	5
Money Value	10
Originality	7
Ryplayability	3
Fulfillment	4
Final Score	5.8

Please let me know what you think of Forbidden Arms!


Until next time,

Ryan





Pictures courtesy of Kongregate