Well, I've received no answer so I'm going to post it here.

Shadow Blade: Reload is a re-release of the original mobile game with the same name by developer Dead Mage for Sony’s PlayStation 4. The game is a side-scrolling platformer centered around traversing obstacles, killing enemies, and collecting things on the way to the goal as fast as you can. It offers three difficulty modes and a story mode told through a motion comic. Collecting everything, killing everything, not dying and being under the time limit will get you the highest rank with zero room for error. Everything, including you, dies in one hit, but respawning is instant and checkpoints are fair.


In gameplay, you have various attacks that you can use with a single button depending on the timing and position of your character relative to the enemy. That is to say, pressing the attack from far away or above will execute a different one-hit-kill maneuver. However, some moves are so efficient and fluid that anything else is obsolete, and with a level’s time limit there is little incentive to ever try anything else. Enemies themselves even by default are absolutely no threat whatsoever and one boss can be defeated by merely standing still. It probably would have been a good idea to have implemented a kill combo streak or awarded points based on kill variation to compensate for this.


The levels are a mix of race course and labyrinth. Collectible orbs guide you to the goal, but there are usually indications of other paths, and some things you need to find with your gaming instincts. The game is at its best when you are in an instinctual, fluid, and efficient flow of running, jumping, killing, and dashing.


The level design itself ranges from smooth to bad. The game’s idea of increasing challenge is pain-in-the-ass placement of enemies and objects, or trial and error gameplay. In one level, a bounce pad throws you directly into a mine, making it impossible to get an S rank without knowing it is there beforehand which is completely unfair and poor design. On higher class difficulties, there are many instances where knowing what is off-screen is the only way to pass the obstacle. Quick respawn alleviates much of the frustration except when going for high score where not-dying is a requirement. In this way, with all the bugs and glitches, it can be greatly problematic.


The game is extremely buggy. Animations, the motion comic, and menus can be misaligned hindering gameplay and viewing experience. Sound effects, visual effects, and music can cut out for entire levels. Platforms don’t always respawn. Sometimes the timer will still count down even if you pause. Bosses can fall through the floor and still attack you. Your score is not always recorded. Background objects can freeze when they should not and much much more. Are they game-breaking? No. Will they negatively impact your fun and score? Yes.


The biggest issue with Shadow Blade Reload is that they did not update or adjust the game for a console release. The controls are stiff and sometimes buggy. The camera is placed very far from the screen and the game is very dark with no options to adjust them. This makes it hard to see, annoying to control, and is especially difficult for dealing with walls.


It can be troublesome to judge their distance and with badly lit edges it can be hard to tell what is happening. Going up by wall jumping is usually not a problem and actually enjoyable, but going down via wall sliding can be a nightmare. Touching a wall latches you on to it and you must press a finicky combination of buttons to drop down. What should have been implemented was to merely let go of the joystick to fall. It was far more challenging, and not in a good way, to deal with this than it was doing literally anything else in this game.


Visually, it is very lackluster for a PSN title. It’s poorly lit with matte coloring and some levels merely have a color filter thrown over them. There is pretty background art but it is obscured by dark background objects most of the time. The zoomed out camera makes it hard to see the animations and differentiate background objects. Because the levels are part-labyrinth, lots of black negative space occupy a large portion of the screen most of the time. It might have been very stylish if it had a cell-shaded look. That would make the characters pop out and playing it far better to see what was happening.


Sound and music are very dull and nothing to be noted.


The story is the epitome of cliché, and in my opinion, thoroughly bad even though visually the comic is nice to look at.


The game staggers between being too easy and being unfair and only gets worse as you try more difficult modes. I am significantly experienced and if I had trouble, certainly others will struggle much worse and I would not blame them in the slightest for dropping this game. While near perfection and memorization of levels is practically required for high rank, there is no reward for doing so. There are no leaderboards on the PS4 version of this game to compete with other players either. Even if there was, the mechanics are not as tight as they need to be. I had more fun ignoring score entirely and playing as fluidly as possible, but unfortunately, that is removing the only replayabilty to be had with this game.


The steam version lists many more features than the PS4 version, so if you decide to look into this game, check out that version. For example, the motion graphic comic that tells the story is fully voiced in the PC version. Ultimately, Shadow Blade: Reload was designed as a mobile game and it does not seem like it was rebalanced as a console game. In its current state on PS4, it is not worth 15 dollars and your time.


This was the draft I submitted but it was rejected and the only words I was given was that it was, "rough" and "hard to follow" and "it's like a list of notes rather than a compiled well thought out review". Do you feel the same? Did anything not make sense?

It was only the second draft. It was a list of bad things that built up into a terrible experience. I tried to make the last sentence of a paragraph relate or lead into the next paragraph. I can see the rough parts certainly, but the irksome part was that it seems they expected something perfect right away and the senior editors offered no advice on what was wrong or how to improve it.

 

The Gaming and PC discussion sub forum would be the appropriate place for this. PM a mod to move it there.

Moreover, the font is terrible, use a sans serif font for easier readability and then I'll read the whole thing.

 

The guy who said that isn't wrong. It's a very matter-of-fact review, which would have been alright if you were writing for The Lancet, but you're not.

You're writing a video game review, make it more entertaining. Shadow Blade is a game with ninjas and shit, it shouldn't be too hard.

It kind of feels like you've been playing this game while jotting down some notes and wrote the review 10 minutes afterwards. Don't.
Play the game, do other things, sleep on it, let it sink in, and then write your review so as to be able to have more in-depth insights on the game.
Write a glowing review about the game, then write a review that absolutely trashes it, then write what you really think about the game.

Take the best out of all of this, and shorten it down to 500 words.

 

Yeah, there is too much information. Personally, once I lose interest I tend to start power-scrolling and scanning for keywords in the text. Instead, I should want to read the entire review and get your whole opinion on it.

Make your paragraphs shorter, don't list every single bad/good feature the game has.

You have a sound stucture, just get rid of all the info dump and have a look at some different game reviews out there. They are short, to the point and some are even entertaining to read.

 

Has anybody ever heard of Darkstation.com?

Sorry. That's not the original font, I just wanted to make it stand out but I didn't format it well. I usually don't do anything extra other than type but I tried messing with options here.

Hey thank you! I wish I was told any of that!

I'm a person who does things on logic, so I'm not sure how to make it more entertaining. I was told to be professional so I eliminated most of my voice. I freakin' hated this game and was far more scathing in my original draft but it was much longer. I've never been a journalist but I found myself doing research and coming across all sorts of inconsistencies and confusion about the game that I wrote about which I had to remove for length's sake.

I wrote about this game over two weeks. I certainly slept on it and did other things, but it was just so awful and yet I had to restrict myself. There was just so much wrong with it that built up into a horrible experience and that's what I wrote. From that standpoint it's consistent but I hear it's not entertaining. I'm not sure how to do that while keeping it short and still getting my point of exactly how much is wrong.

I don't want to be vague either. I wanted to offer proof and hard examples of all the shit I found in that game.

But "Write a glowing review about the game, then write a review that absolutely trashes it, then write what you really think about the game." That's some neat advice. I won't do it for this game but for a future one I will. I spent too much time with Shadowblade and my tunnel vision is too strong.

500 words seems woefully inadequate though. The review that got me noticed was my Dark Souls 3 PS4 review on Gamefaqs. That unexpectedly won review of the month there and it was in the same style and of greater length, so the "advice" I got from the Darkstation editor was very confusing.

What keywords do you look for?

There was certainly a ton wrong with this game. It felt unfinished and I wanted to list the sheer variety of things that made me feel that way. I felt if I didn't include them, it could be called into question that I didn't play it enough or correctly. Some of this shit was rookie mistakes that should never be seen for an official release. I would have understood if it was an early access game which it once was but this was a disgrace.

I'll try writing a 500 word treatment though.

 

Another advice I have is to read great reviews from Kotaku with a more critical eye. See the tricks authors employ to transition from one thought to another. Also the opening paragraph has to be catchy.

As an example, take a look at the opening lines for reviews: http://kotaku.com/tag/review

None of them just out and say this is a game on such and such platform by such and such developer like you do:

This is dry, you need to build a narrative and that starts with the first line.

 

Here is a rough 530 word treatment I wrote in 30 minutes.

Shadow Blade: Reload is a re-release of the original mobile game with the same name by developer Dead Mage for Sony’s PlayStation 4. The game is a side-scrolling platformer centered on traversing obstacles, killing enemies, and collecting things on the way to the goal as fast as you can. It offers three difficulty modes and a story mode told through a motion comic.


Controls are simple with one button for each move those being throwing shurikens, attack, dash and jump. Everything, including you, dies in one hit, but respawning is instant and checkpoints are fair.


The levels are a mix of race course and labyrinth. Collectible orbs guide you to the goal, but there are usually indications of other paths. The game is at its best when you are in an instinctual, fluid, and efficient flow of running, jumping, killing, and dashing.


However, this game is very bad. It is rife with glitches of all kinds. Animations, sound effects, music, menu alignment. Respawns, timers, bosses, AI. And sad to say these bugs come up frequently. None of it is game breaking but it will impact your fun and is certainly not the quality of a game that charges 15 dollars.


Controls, while simple, alternate being smooth and being a buggy pain in the ass, especially on walls. It seems they did not fix anything when porting this over from mobile. Most of my personal frustration was trying to simply descend a wall. It was tougher than any of the bosses on any difficulty and in general enemies are no threat whatsoever.


Visually, it’s very poor. The camera is zoomed out too far. levels are obscured with too much garbage and black negative space. The lighting is bad and coloring is boring.


Even something as minor as character introductions are unpleasantly jarring. An ugly salmon-colored filter covers the screen as bland text with unsynced audio displays the new character’s uninspired name. The kamikaze bot does indeed explode on you. The Stinger does indeed fire stinger rockets. And mooks like the Iron Fist do indeed have an iron fist.


Sound and music are so dull that there is nothing more to actually say about them.


The story, told through the improperly aligned motion comic, is the epitome of cliché with horrible, nonsensical writing. The game seems very uninspired visually, aurally, and intellectually.



With all this poor quality, high scores require perfection which is unreasonable and unfun when the mechanics are not as precise as they need to be. And there is no reward for achieving good ranks. I did have some fun, but it was infrequent and when I was ignoring collectibles, most enemies and the grade.


For a mobile game ShadowBlade may be alright, but it does not hold up as PSN title. Nothing is fixed to compensate for a controller or more powerful hardware and with the massive amount of bugs and glitches it is certainly not worth 15 dollars. Apparently, the steam version lists many more features, like full voice acting, for the same price, so if you have to investigate this game, look into that version but I would still not recommend it until the price drops dramatically.


---------- Post automerged at 12:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:41 AM ----------

I'm sorry, but that part was something explicitly that I was told to do unless I somehow misinterpreted them but they never corrected it twice if that was so. My first draft line was: Shadow Blade: Reload needs a lot of work.

But to make it "professional" and to go according to their style guide document they sent me, I changed it to what you read.

And Kotaku has had a significantly dodgy reputation for a very long time so I never go there, but I understand your point.

 

Much better than the first. More of a sneak peak of what to expect rather than an entire game bug library - 'The game is extremely buggy. Animations, the motion comic, and menus can be misaligned hindering gameplay and viewing experience. Sound effects, visual effects, and music can cut out for entire levels. Platforms don’t always respawn. Sometimes the timer will still count down even if you pause. Bosses can fall through the floor and still attack you. Your score is not always recorded. Background objects can freeze when they should not and much much more. Are they game-breaking? No. Will they negatively impact your fun and score? Yes.'

And what keywords you ask? It's just any words I could take note of in a paragraph that I'm actually interested in. I see 'freezing' and I look back at the last couple words. Oh ok, the game freezes at a bunch of levels. (I'm aware that this explanation might not be much to go on, but I'm not sure how I can explain it to you xD)

 

I'd be happy to help you, but can you please stop trying to make your review stand out by using strange font, and ridiculous color. Just seperate it with a damn line and give it a title in bold and everyone will know where it starts.