Naraka: Bladepoint Review

Naraka: Bladepoint is a battle royale game with up to 60 players online duking it out to see who will be the last one standing. Instead of your typical battle royale with various guns, you get right up close with tons of martial arts melee attacks and an assortment of weapons such as a staff, katanas, and even nunchucks. Naraka: Bladepoint offers a variety of modes to play, like Ranked Mode, Quick Match, Immortal War, or Bot Mode (yes you can change how strong they are). When you start out, you will be in many rounds with bots, so you can learn how the game works before you are tossed in with seasoned players. 

Each attack has a weakness and strength, just like if you were playing paper-rock-scissors. The game introduces the Souljade system that powers up your weapons when attacking and using combos. Each of your playthroughs will feel completely different depending on which character you choose and the weapon you decide to equip them with. Practise enough to learn how the attacking system works, with the strengths and weaknesses for each. Then you will be able to stand up to the strongest players, but it will definitely take time to learn these. Naraka: Bladepoint has a grappling system coupled with parkour action that will let you scale any cliff or structure you find. The grapple hook can also be used to shoot at your enemy to bring you up close to them to attack. Besides being able to explore the whole map, grappling is also handy for when you have to try to get away from your enemy or escape from the Shadow Corruption that is taking over the land and will kill you. 

After playing through the introduction/tutorial as Viper, you will be allowed to select from a few different characters to play as and the option to customise their features. Once you are in battle, you get to select your spawn point on the map. You can find weapons and items to pick up all over, but I found it easier to go to the areas that looked like they had a settlement. Naraka: Bladepoint has items (Weapon Repair Kits and Armour Powder) that allow you to fix weapons and armour, restoring them back to their full strength. Your character can pick up a variety of weapons and easily switch between them depending on the situation you are in. I found it handy to have a bow for longer ranged attacks along with weapons like swords for close combat. There is a limit to how many you can carry, so you may have to drop some of the weapons that you don’t find as useful. Your bag for items is also limited, so be sure to prioritise inventory space for the things you really need. 

Naraka is a beautiful-looking game, the cinematics look amazing, and you can see the influences of the far east in everything from the music to the environments and the characters. The martial arts fighting is incredibly fluid and smooth — I never found it to be jerky or slow. Which is impressive, considering how nice it looks! At times I felt like I was a character in a movie, fighting off an endless stream of opponents like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. However, based on my skills, I was more like one of the poor fighters who was put up against him. If you fall in battle, you can come back to life if you can get your soul to the beam of light which marks the Soul Alter on your map within the time limit. Though, once you die twice your run is done and you will see a screen showing your stats like how many enemies you killed and how far you travelled. You will get points to level up and can also see how many quests you completed. Some are as easy as attacking with a specific character or weapon, or visiting certain locations on the map.  

There are a lot of people online that complain that the game is dead in the west and if you decide to play online with other people, the majority are players from China who have a higher ping rate making it really hard to hit them. Most of the time I just played the game with bots as my skill level is definitely not high enough to take on players who have been playing Naraka: Bladepoint for a while. The game was released back in August 2021, so I am very late to the party! 

Like a lot of other battle royale-type games, there is a store where you can buy skins and outfits for your characters. There is even an option to purchase a battle pass to get the monthly offerings. You are not required to buy anything besides the core game, but if you really want to spend the money to purchase something, you can. There are Daily and Season Quests to complete where you can earn skins.

Naraka: Bladepoint is a great-looking battle royale-type game that is different from the other popular PVP titles out there, like Fortnite. Close combat melee fighting with martial arts and cool weapons was a nice change. There is a learning curve here, and even though the concept of each attack having a strength and weakness seems easy, it takes a while to learn and memorise so you can react fast enough to each attack that comes at you. When playing against other human opponents since there aren’t any region restrictions, you may have to take on people from other areas with a higher ping rate. This makes it feel unfair when you can’t properly fight back. If you enjoy melee combat in games, tons of action, great cinematics and music in your games, I am sure you will enjoy Naraka: Bladepoint.