A bite-sized FPS that features ninjas, ninjas, and more ninjas.
Flash of the Blade X is a Retro FPS game developed by DOSMan Games using the Easy FPS Editor engine. You play as a Ninja who was betrayed by their Ninja clan and now seeks revenge. Featuring a handful of ninja weapons against a variety of sneaky ninjas with slightly tougher ninja bosses to take your ninja skills on. It greatly resembles something you might find on a Shareware floppy disk back in the day given it's artstyle, level design, and it's length.
Gameplay wise, Flash of the Blade X features Retro FPS gameplay staples with keys to find, lots of enemies to beat, and the occasional secret. Levels have a Wolfenstein 3D-esque design to it with a lot of 90 degree walls with some extra height factored in. With the occasional boss fight every few levels. As a Ninja you have access to a variety of familiar weaponry like Katanas, Shurikens, Crossbow, Sais, etc. With melee weapons taking a higher priority given their lack of needing ammo and ranged mostly being used for targets you can't easily reach. With ammo gained from pickups hidden in breakable items as well with health. Enemies either beeline to your location once alert or if they're a ranged foe, pick you off from afar. It's overall a pretty basic gameplay loop akin to the simplicity of very early FPS games with a ninja flair. It reminds me the most of early betas of Shadow Warrior, of all things. It made me wish while playing that FotBX somehow remixed some of the ideas from those betas that were dropped, like the magic system. But given the engine who knows if that would have been possible.
Stylewise, Flash of the Blade X has a very "DOS-game" pixel art... art style. which given that the developer and publisher is "DOSMan Games" is pretty fitting. It's also pretty notable that despite the game's fairly short scope there is a decent amount of variety with the enemy and environment graphics making it so that you don't feel like you're constantly retreading the same ground. As such, even despite the engine's limitations there is a attempt at designing the levels as locations in this style and it's pretty charming. Kinda like a: "what if the Wolf 3D engine could make houses or anything that isn't 1 block high castle corridors."
Overall, for what it's worth, Flash of the Blade X is a pretty decent way to kill some time. Given it's pretty short campaign along with it's price, I'd be silly to put this against the greatest of Retro FPS games. Its very clear that wasn't the mission statement for game, even if it does leave you with the feeling of missed potential. Honestly the most frustrating part of the game was the lack of mouse sensitivity adjustment in the settings, as it's at a awkwardly high setting by default with no way to edit it with the version of the engine this game uses. But for a base price of 3 measly dollars and even cheaper on sale, there's not too much to fuss about that's within reason.
