[h1]A Cautionary Tale Of Chasing Trends[/h1]
There's plenty to enjoy with [i]Bleeding Edge[/i], while at the same time it disappoints in its most important aspects. The art style is vibrant and neat, the characters have some cool designs, the music is alright, and it was a bold move to basically make a "Hero Shooter" but replace the "Shooter" part with a melee brawler. But, none of these elements really come together to make for a truly engaging and lasting experience.
[h1]The Good[/h1]
The art is solid. It's nice to see a cyberpunk world that's not just either blinding neon or perpetually stormy grunge. Some of the characters have cool designs that manage to take the augmented cyborg factor of the cyberpunk world and blend them with more fantasy-inspired themes. Maeve is basically an old school witch with laser fingers in lieu of magic. El Bastardo having a "hat" that's really a housing for his cyborg eye, and a breathing hose apparatus under his nose that looks like a big mustache is a cool approach to the cowboy theme. Cass' EXTRA THICC cyber cassowary legs compliment her svelte ballerina figure. Kulev is easily one of the best designs of any character in any game, being a cyborg snake that controls his original body that's now a rotting corpse dressed like Baron Samedi, using a mix of advanced technology and voodoo magic. But good character design and clean art direction can't save a bad foundation.
[h1]The Bad[/h1]
Making a "Hero Shooter" without the Shooter part, focusing instead on melee combat, was a novel concept, but the gameplay loop and balancing doesn't lend itself well to that kind of design. Characters have very little in the way of defense, and even the ones that DO have some kind of defensive abilities/escapes rarely get to make use of them when they'd be most valuable due to the constant hitstun. Everyone has the ability to Parry attacks, but it's not very responsive, and the timing is inhumanly tight to accomplish reliably even against the slowest attacks, especially in an online game where the slightest hiccup will ruin it. Clearing objectives is straightforward enough, but the maps are so large that the slow move speed of all characters makes navigating a chore even with the use of the hoverboard that everyone has (some larger heroes like Zero Cool simply go into "speed mode", and Cass builds speed as she runs). It all makes even a single game feel slower than it reasonably should given how it's a competitive PVP action game where you're expected to enter multiple matches.
[h1]The Epic Fail[/h1]
The game was doomed from the start. By the time it was even announced, the market was already flooded with all kinds of PVP games, many of free to play, and "Hero Shooters" especially were already loaded with plenty of established competitors. [i]Overwatch[/i] had pretty much dominated the entire market for 4 years already, with [i]Paladins[/i] offering a solid f2p alternative. Making what was essentially the same kind of game, but with inferior slower gameplay was a guarantee to make [i]Bleeding Edge[/i] fail. While it's looking back in hindsight, the overwhelming success of [i]Helldivers 2[/i] shows that there certainly was and still is a healthy market for online PVE games, and [i]Bleeding Edge[/i] could've been one to try and make its mark in that arena. Even the game's own story makes it better suited for PVE gameplay, being about a group of ragtag cyborg misfits banding together to fight back against the MegaCorps that dominate the world. It makes little sense, both in story and in real world marketing, to make such a sloppy attempt at yet another PVP game.
