AeternoBlade II-Directors Rewind Review (Steam)

AeternoBlade II: Director’s Rewind is a hardcore action-puzzle game of Time-Manipulation Combat. Control the flow of time, amend the past, foresee the future, convolute with alternate timelines to fight otherwise undefeatable foes, and circumvent the impossible.

Pros:

• Decent graphics.
• 7407MB download size.
• Steam achievements.
• Controller support.
• Action game gameplay.
• Graphics-fullscreen, resolution, v-sync, resolution scale, texture quality, post-processing, shadow quality, effect quality, anti-aliasing, and auto-detect.
• Game settings-damage numbers on/off and show enemies health bar on/off.
• Controller-six layouts and custom.
• Can rebind keyboard.
• Invert axis and sensitivity sliders.
• Voice language-English or Thai.
• Five difficulties.
• Extras-Gallery and costume viewer.
• The opening level has tutorial pop ups with the controls.
• Fast-paced melee fighting game.
• Devil May Cry vibes for both combat and the speed of the game.
• Combo counter.
• Camera-you primarily plays on a 2D side-on view but certain areas like boss fights will change the camera to a 3rd person perspective.
• Each screen is a zone and generally, you clear the screen to open the next zone.
• Can skip cutscenes.
• Norns idol-save point in-game and place to add/remove items from your 3 quick slots.
• Actions-attack both light and heavy, dodge, counter attacks, air juggling, and ground attacks.
• Levels have verticality to them and you can ascend with your hook.
• Slight puzzle elements.
• Time paradox ability–set up and perform an action and then let it go and it will do that action leaving you to do what you need to do.
• Enigmata-you can unlock trials from save points which are self-contained levels with rewards.
• Full stats screen.
• Time travel elements allow puzzle-solving and kick-ass fight sequences.
• Feels polished and smooth.
• Combat is very easy to learn and looks more complicated than it is.

Cons:

• Slowdown hitches when transitioning to a cutscene.
• Very button mashy.
• Forces the time paradox powers on you early on and doesn’t let you bypass it.
• Tedious zones whereby you need to send it back to the enemy who threw it.
• I personally didn’t like the puzzles as it is very time travel-focused and it always felt like it would sometimes work.
• Fighting gets very repetitive.
• Unbalanced difficulties with easy being far too easy and anything else being ridiculously hard with high enemy numbers used to pad the difficulty.
• Dodge skill requires pixel-perfect accuracy.