Back in the early ’90s, top-down arcade shooters were all the rage. Kids spent hours upon hours and what could possibly be several hundred dollars trying to get their initials to the top of each leaderboard and gain greatness amongst their closest friends. Since then kids have regressed back into the dark pits they call their rooms, and have taken to playing online, where they not only compete against their friends, but against the best players around the world. Competitive gameplay has become the crux of gaming today, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a game that doesn’t have some form of online connectivity.
Ghost Blade HD takes the arcade goodness of the ’90s and mixes it up with high-definition graphics, coupled with online leaderboards and brings your childhood back screaming. Ghost Blade takes the arcade style of Crimson Clover and turns it up to eleven. The game features five stages, each tasked with bringing your ship down as fast as possible. The game also features three difficulty settings, which by admission, I only stuck to easy since the other settings made it impossible to finish for an arcade “noob” like myself. Even with the easy setting, I only managed to get to the fourth stage before my ship was completely destroyed, even after multiple attempts.
Ghost Blade HD does feature some of the most colorful graphics and art. When I started the game I was met with a barrage of in-your-face anime characters and I cringed for a bit before I realized it was only limited to the menus. The rest of the game is extremely fast-paced and the underlying unit design goes pretty much unnoticed for the most part. During gameplay, the entire screen fills up with enemy units firing at you with a barrage of different weapons and dodging them all becomes your main objective, even if that is nearly impossible.
Talking about controls, the game is quite playable and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what controls you need to use to take down some bad guys. However, the main premise of the game is to survive for as long as possible. Unfortunately the game doesn’t offer you any other way of dodging fire than to move side to side, which means you’ll always be in the firing line. The game also tends to slow down considerably when the screen is filled with enemy fire until it all explodes to relieve strain.
Ghost Blade HD is an extremely fun game, with fast gameplay mechanics that will give the most hardcore of arcade fans something to sink their teeth into. The game isn’t easy by even the most basic standards, and for the price of admission, is worth the cost. However, the lack of any meat beyond the mere five stages, and no behind-the-scenes story will leave the casual gamer feeling a bit ripped off. If you’re willing to look beyond that, you will find one of the more fun indie games on Xbox One.
Summary
The game offers good replayability, pushing you to become the master of the universe on the online leaderboards and to team up with your friends to take on the biggest bosses in the hardest of modes.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.