I've been pretty easy on games lately. Syndicate, Armored Core 5 and Prototype 2 probably would have deserved a bit stricter treatment, but eh. I've been going through some shitty times in my personal life, and the notion that amidst all that I can still enjoy games more than they deserve just sounds nice.
But after this one there's no way anyone can land to other conclusion than that I have been replaced by a pod-person from space working to drown the world in mediocrity.

Gaijin Entertainment is a weird, weird damn company. Just look at the name, what kind of weeaboos would come up with that? Their perhaps most infamous game is X-Blades, that was ridiculed to hell and back.
But on the other hand, the very same company made Apache: Air Assault, that one arcade sim that's better than the rest of the entire genre put together. Along with Apache, they gave a beautiful treatment for the old Sturmovik, arriving with both games in a perfect middleground between action and realism.
And then they did a sequel for X-Blades.

Initially I had no interest in Blades of Time. Everything about it looked so blatant and rushed I spent all of seven seconds snickering at it before proceeding with my life. But as it happened, fate decided to toss an early copy of the PC-version to my lap, so what the heck, I checked it out.
Rarely I have gone to any game with lower expectations. I *knew* Blades of Time sucked golf balls through garden hoses. I expected to spend 15 minutes with it at the best case scenario, before deleting it and forgetting it ever existed.
A week later I had completed it twice, was utterly enamored with the game, and felt rather insulted. The nerve! What right this game has to kick ass?

The story is about as half-assed as they come. Ayumi is a treasure hunter who has some kind of aversion to clothes, she gets stuck in a paraller dimension and kills stuff.

Ok, so it's another Devil May Cry -style hack'n'slash. Blades of Time is one of those strange games that are completely derivative, but get just about everything right. It doesn't push the boundaries of the genre, but polishes what has been done to near perfection.
These kind of games are infuriating to review. You should mark them down for just stagnating, but on the other hand, almost no game that got here before managed to sew together everything quite as smoothly.

The gimmick of the game is a time manipulation mechanic, which is visible right there in the title. Pressing the shoulder button rewinds time, but Blades of Time has a little twist to give for the gimmick. It's not that Sands of Time -thing where you escape danger by rewinding time, as Ayumi herself stays right where she is and everything else rewinds. When you release the button, the past copy of Ayumi repeats what you just did, but the enemies now react to either the time clone or the real Ayumi. And you're able to repeat and overlap the procedure multiple times, eventually creating half a dozen copies of Ayumi jumping around and kicking ass.
It can get pretty crazy, and the game expects for you to make use of the mechanic. Some special enemies need to be attacked from multiple directions, while others will keep attacking relentlessly so they have to be distracted.
It's less Sands of Time and more a hack'n'slash version of Echoshift. Figuring the time rewinding and cloning is essential later in the game, and it makes things easier earlier on the trek, too. As you can produce multiple clones of Ayumi hacking away, stacking an ever increasing number of them will take heaviest of enemies down awfully fast.

However, the feature I found most striking about Blades of Time is how the combo gauge and healing are treated.
Unlike the genre tradition, there's no inventory full of healing items, and you don't gather souls to purchase more stuff. Instead, maxing out the combo gauge by whacking enemies gives you a medikit, and resets the gauge. Each medkit recovers about 50% of your health, and you can only carry three. In addition, at 1/3 and 2/3 limits the combo gauge unlocks special moves, the use of which reduces the gauge.
This brings a surprisingly fine balance to harder fights. Using special attacks means not being able to recover health, while recovering health means not killing as many enemies. I'd go as far as calling the system ingenious, as the core combat mechanics are very limited, but the recovery system adds a tactical layer that makes the whole feel multiple times deeper.
On the other hand, this means there aren't those times where you're trying to save your hard-earned potions for the boss. But then again, you can never be content with the dozen potions you have in your pockets.

As I said, the core combat system itself is quite limited. Ayumi has only a couple of different moves, and all the weapons found through the game only vary in appearance and special effects, not even power or moves. Removing the health recovery gimmick would immediately doom the game.
In addition to hacking away with swords, Ayumi also has firearms at her disposal. Drawing a weapon changes to an over-the-shoulder view, and jumping between modes in combat flows like a pile of bricks.
Even though some enemy types need to be shot, Blades of Time never puts too much weight on the unwieldly gunplay.

Later on the game also gets surprisingly challenging. And in a good way, I might add.
What I especially like is how Blades of Time is not afraid of mixing different enemy types.
Y'know how every DMC-class of game has a bunch of special enemies that can only be defeated by very specific means, but usually they're encountered either alone or with only a small group of very basic grunts.
Blades of Time likes to go crazy once in a while with throwing every type of special baddie at you in big clusterfucks. Shielded enemies that need to be shot by three time clones, while another baddie is throwing around freezing shockwaves and ranged baddies take potshots at you from the distance. Especially on harder difficulty level the game involves a surprising amount of thinking on your feet and improvising. It's rare to see any game put their own gimmicks into this good use.

It's also a quite pretty game. While the actual level design is uninspired bunch of tubes with enemies in them, the scenery is beautiful and varied. Starting with lush jungles, Ayumi's journey takes her through the obligatory ruins, the Protoss home world (more on that in a sec), scorching deserts and freezing mountains. The enemies are less inspired, but work ok and at the very least match the general themes well enough.
Ayumi herself is quite well modeled and animated, with particular care put to the physics pf her ribboned ponytails, and less surprisingly, her well-toned ass. It's the little things that make you praise the evolving graphics technology. The little things like snazzy horizontal lens flares thrown by light reflecting off our heroine's round buttocks.

And, yeah, the Protoss stuff. I guess someone else got tired of waiting for that Starcraft: Ghost, but forgot it was supposed to be about stealth.
A few hours into the game Ayumi slips into this somewhat familiar-looking techno-spandex and starts murdering what couldn't be more obvious Protoss if this was the fucking Heart of the Swarm, on Aiur itself. Too bad we don't face any Zergs this time.
But I guess Blizzard is off the hook now. They couldn't get Starcraft: Ghost done after fumbling around with it for a decade, so somebody goddamned had to step up.

Gameplay itself tries to keep some variety up through the duration. While the basic fodder can be killed with the same tricks in every world, there's always a new special baddie that requires some new trick to drop. And in this case, fortunately, the game is not that long. Personally I felt Blades of Time ended just when it was about to overstay its welcome.

Because if its nature, I could never give any glowing recommendations for Blades of Time. Nobody is going to remember it in a year, and it lacks ambition. As evident, I had a blast with it, but can't guarantee the same for everyone.
On the other hand, in a world where shit like God of War went to be a successful and extremely popular series, Blades of Time deserves recognition.