Die by the Blade is a weapon-based fighting game developed by Triple Hill Interactive and Grindstone. The game proudly wears its Bushido Blade influence on its sleeves. It sports that addictive one-strike-one-kill mantra of old, but even that isn’t enough to mask its other shortcomings.

Developer & Publisher // Triple Hill Interactive & Grindstone

Platforms // PC

MSRP & Release Date // $19.99, May 16th, 2024

Reviewed On // PC

Only Fights, No Frills

Die by the Blade is a pure fighting game. No story, no-nonsense. Just set up your match or tournament and you’re good to go. Game modes include versus, practice, tournament, tutorial, and challenge mode that is unlocked at a much later time. Frankly, the game modes are quite basic unless you’re a die-hard trying to get into the competitive side of the game.

To my surprise, when booting the game, players are thrown into the menus, and they are free to do as they please. No forced tutorials or explanations, just do what you want as you want. Yet, I felt that was a misstep. Because Die by the Blade has a lot of unique combat intricacies, it was a mistake not to prompt the tutorial immediately.

Stellar and Addictive Combat in Die by the Blade

Hands down the best aspect of Die by the Blade is the game’s addictive combat. Taking inspiration from the old PlayStation 1 Bushido Blade franchise, the game implements that tasty one-strike-immediate kill mechanic. I can’t describe how satisfying it is to nail that perfect strike that just decimates your enemy immediately. If you’re lucky, the hit will also take off a limb or a head, a true crescendo to a high-intensity duel.

Stance also plays an important part in Die by the Blade’s combat. Players can switch up between the game’s three stances (high, neutral, low) with a flick of the right analog. If your stance matches the attackers, you will deflect their attacks. However, you can’t block indefinitely, as your resolve meter depletes with each block and parry. This can lead to truly epic fights that can be over instantly if you’re not careful.

Hit Detection Inconsistencies

When it comes to fighters, hit detection is critical to the experience. For the most part, Die by the Blade has decent hit detection. Though on a few occasions when testing out the multiplayer, I could tell that some hits that you think you’d land were not registering. That was a major bummer as it could turn the tide in a round obviously. Luckily, these incidents were few and far apart, but worth noting nonetheless.

Characters & Weapons

There are seven characters for players to unlock. Each Character has their own stats, where the key ones are speed and stamina. Speed is clearly noticeable off the mark, as it determines your character’s movement speed. While stamina is directly correlated to the resolve meter. However, despite the stat variation, the characters are quite boring and uninspired. They feel no different from the different accessories that you purchase. Conversely, the weapons have more personality to them than the actual characters.

There are a total of five weapons to unlock. Each has its own distinctive feel to it. The Katana is balanced in its range and speed, while the Waikizashi is fast, but has a much shorter range. Each weapon felt unique and had its own idiosyncrasies to learn. Such as the Naginata has a lot of range, but a missed strike can easily open you up to a counter.

After each fight, you are rewarded with XP and coins to level up and purchase different items from the shop. Of course, if you win your match the payout is higher, but it still feels quite stingy overall. It’ll take a while to unlock everything the game has to offer. Unlocking characters, Customization Options, and weapons are the key drivers for motivating players to continue playing.

Tons of Weapons and Characters to Unlock

If there’s one aspect that Die by the Blade does well is the plethora of customization options available. This includes customization options for both characters and weapons alike. Each character has a ton of customization options to unlock with in-game credit. Everything from head accessories to outfits, and shoulder gear can be purchased with in-game currency. No doubt players can create some truly whacky getups for their characters and add some personalization to the game. I enjoyed head accessories the most in particular because they would mask the neutral faces and give the character a little more pizzazz. Similarly, weapons customization is very deep.

Let’s be honest, the weapons are the true characters of Die by the Blade. There are a ton of weapons customization options. Players can customize the pommel, grip, collar, blade, and more of any given weapon. The different combinations truly seem endless and will help build bonds with your arsenal.

Die by the Blade Graphics

When it comes to the graphics, Die by the Blade doesn’t look too impressive, despite running on Unreal Engine. Animations are quite stiff and facial expressions are blank as they come. However, the developers did note that facial animations are not final and could be changed shortly after release. Moreover, character models look basic at best. They might have some interesting details here and there, but they don’t stand out in any particular way. With the exception of the character named Butterfly, but not in the good. She can look completely washed out with certain outfits. This is especially true with her leisurewear outfit. Perhaps it’s a bug that could be remedied, but it was immediately noticeable how washed up she looked during matches.

Though environments are varied, they don’t look too distinctive. Sure, there’s a dojo, a street level, and a grassy training area, but most of them look bland and uninspired.

Smartly, Die by the Blade does not fall victim to the pesky wall collision that fighting games can suffer from. But when two fighters get up close behind some decor, a window will pop up to make sure everything is still visible. Ensuring players can still fight normally.

UI Blues

There are also some inconsistencies when it comes to the game’s UI. For instance, the XP bar seems disproportionate to the actual XP accumulated. In addition, new characters and weapon unlocks are ordered strangely. Unlocks are not placed in sequential order, instead they are just all over the place. In other words, the level 9 unlock appears before the level 6 unlock.

Die by the Blade Performance

Running on an AMD Ryzen 7 5700x, a Radeon 5700 XT, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM, the game runs smoothly. I was averaging around 100 FPS and there weren’t any noticeable dips.

I do turn off motion blur, ambient occlusion, bloom, and film grain in all of my games, this one included. This will help increase your frames no doubt. But again, the game doesn’t look too spectacular and if it wants to survive in the fight game community, it should look to the lowest common denominator to make sure more people can play the Die by the Blade. The recommended GPU is an RTX 2060, which feels overkill for the scope and graphics of the game.

There were some graphical oddities here are there. Most notably when dismembering a fighter’s leg would cause the players to hilariously hop around for a few seconds before falling down. As you can imagine the blank facial expressions did add to the hilarity of these moments.

Multiplayer – Playing with Friends Requires Jumping Through Hoops

Players will have a couple of options when it comes to multiplayer in Die by the Blade. There’s local co-op available. Ranked matchmaking will link you immediately with any available player on Steam. Players can also organize online tournaments for up to eight players.

For the most part, there was little lag when playing online. Connections seemed stable for the most part. However, when lag was present, it completely deteriorated the experience. But there weren’t too many players online during the review period, which is something worth mentioning.

When it comes to playing with a friend online, there are a couple of steps to make it happen. Players will have to generate an invite code and receive their friend’s code. Once you get the code, you have to enter it and wait for the connection to be made.

I was able to get a few games with fellow lord Joe Repko and we had a blast, despite getting wrecked. However, after my defeats, I wanted to immediately jump back into a duel, but we couldn’t. We had to exit and resend the invite code once again. It was an annoyance that impeded that “one more match” that fighters are famous for.

Audio Design

Let’s just get this out of the way, it’s clear that the audio design did not receive a significant portion of the game’s budget. The only voice acting involved in Die by the Blade is the grunts that the character produces. And surprise, they are not that riveting. The clash of blades sounds fine and resonates decently well. While the soundtrack is quite tackey and forgettable.

Final Thoughts on Die by the Blade

The Way of the Blade is a difficult journey and tenacious. Despite Die by the Blade sporting an addictive and pulsating one-strike-kill combat, it is not enough to gloss over the other glaring shortcomings. From unpolished graphics, stingy reward payouts to the lack of game modes, the game has a lot going against it. However, the blade isn’t dull yet, and Die by the Blade can sharpen into a formidable contender with time.

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