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 When
an enemy is visible to your character, a little icon will appear
in the upper-right corner of the screen. This displays the type
of enemy, his health and level. When this icon appears you can lock
on to the enemy. This will always keep your character facing the
opponent and all attacks made will be directed towards him. If the
enemy escapes your field-of-view, you'll loose the lock-on and the
icon will disappear from the screen. You'll then need to reallocate
your enemy. The target-lock is not necessary to attack the opponents,
but it's very helpful and a really nice feature. If you are facing
several enemies, you can toggle the target-lock and cycle between
them by pressing the proper keys. There was also an automatic target
and cycling opportunity from the game options. I did not try it
out, but it can be set to cycle between targets at a given time-rate.
I didn't quite understand how it worked in detail or whether it
will stay in the game.
The bow and arrow is quite simple to use, but
I found it hard to aim and hit anything with it. When you press
the 'attack' key, the camera will move towards the character until
you reach the 1st person view. The longer time you hold the button,
the further back the arrow is pulled before you release it. In the
1st person view you can see the bow and arrow to the right and the
aim is at the center of the screen. There were no crosshair marking
the aim, but I guess this will be an option to turn on or off -
come to think of it, I don't think I remembered to target any enemies
when trying out this. Well, let's just wait and see how it will
turn out and continue with the preview. You can pick up used arrows
and put them back in the quiver as long as their not broken. Running
around picking up arrows, while an orc was shooting at me with his
bow, made me look like a voodoo-doll; not a very smart move of me.
As you move closer to the enemy, he will put down the bow and pull
up a melee weapon.
If you've seen the Blade mpeg, you probably
remember the part where the knight set a barrel on fire with a torch.
I got to see this used in a more practical way. Not far from that
spot (with the barrels) is a bunch of stacked wooden boxes. Throwing
the torch at the stack resulted in a huge inferno of flames. The
really cool part about it was when an enemy, in full flames, came
running out of the spot; taking some last panicking steps before
he fell carbonized and lifeless to the ground. Looked painful!
The enemy AI and behavior is just impressive.
While fighting against three traitor knights you can truly see how
well the co-ordination and grouping works. When you harm one of
them, he will try to move away from you while the other two will
close in on you, protecting the most injured, while trying to flank
and attack you. One of the knights was carrying a health-potion,
which you could see from the icons in the upper-right corner of
the screen. When he lost a certain amount of health, he fell out
of the group and grabbed his health-potion. You could see him putting
the potion to his mouth and drinking it, and as his health gained
he immediately re-grouped with the others. Really cool!
 The
differences between the enemy races are obvious. Orcs are the complete
opposite of the traitor knights; they have no sense of co-ordination
and are very aggressive. Orcs sometimes end up fighting among themselves,
if they by mistake hit one of the others. The skeletons grow up
from the earth and are tough to kill. They are really good at dodging
your attacks. The zombies continue to fight you even after cutting
off their limbs, and chopping off their head is the only way to
effectively kill them. The larger enemies have slower movement and
attacks, but have great power and are equally hard to kill. They
are many and they all look, behave and feel very different, which
benefits the gameplay a lot.
A nice touch in Blade is how the characters
get fatigued. All characters and enemies get exhausted while fighting
- some more than others - and this affects the fighting-abilities.
Your melees and combos get slower and does not recover before you
take a break to relax. As you get injured and loose health, you
can recover it by picking up and using health-potions or food.
The weapons look and feels great, and they
deliver different types of damage according to the type and class
they belong to. The weapons are character dependant. This does not
mean that the Barbarian can't use a weapon suited for the Knight,
but place a short sword into the hands of the Barbarian and he'll
be swinging it very slow compared to the Knight with the same weapon.
The Amazon is found of light, but long-range weapons. I had some
fun spanking some orcish ass, while playing as the Amazon with a
spear for weapon. The Dwarf is more into battle-axes, war-hammers
and the kind. This works very well and you can see what kind of
weapon you wield, along with its attributes, from the inventory
screen - which is part of a more content filled 'Travel Book'.
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