Die By The Blade Review: Live By The Sword? Not For Long!

ADie By The Blade review is here, the spiritual successor to Bushido Blade. Forget the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and consider Six Degrees of a Japanophile: there’s bound to be someone, yourself included, who has an affinity for samurai, ninja, and Bulbasaur that will love this one-on-one insta-kill game.

Progress isn’t so ‘insta’, as players must persist before they scratch the surface and unlock all the goodies. To begin with, there are only two starting characters: Yoshi, a generic samurai type, and Butterfly, a token agile female with a suggestive wardrobe. Without any campaign or online options (at the time of the review), the only thing to do besides tutorials was a versus option.

Nevertheless, the metaphorical wrapper was ripped off the Die By The Blade review code and immediately played without a controller. The natural feel of switching For Honor-like stances with a mouse was decent, though swinging one’s blade and performing combos was far better with a controller, even on the Steam Deck.

The concept is simple: don’t die. Another way of looking at it is to kill the other dude before they kill you. One horizontal or vertical slice is all you need for a win, so battles are high-octane, or if you’re a real samurai, they’re meticulously slow. However, if you’re impatient, you’ll want to go in fast and unlock all the stuff.

Each win earns XP, which you can use to level up your profile and access new characters and features. The money can also buy new skins, accessories, and customisable weapons. The variety of customisations is interesting, as they fuse the traditional with neon-like cyberpunk apparel, making you stand out if that’s your thing.

The characters in Die By The Blade are more cosmetic than anything. A blurb will give an insight into their origin story, and there are individual stats, but these never really come to light as the standout elements are the weapons and the basic moves. Finishers are available, but the fiddly timing means it’s better to assassinate than procrastinate.

With three stances (high, mid and low) and a vertical and horizontal slash, you only need the parrying feature and the roll to catch an opponent off guard with a lunge or dash out of the way to reach for your inhaler. Tell a lie – timing is paramount. Without it, you’re dead, buddy.

Timing ultimately follows the same principles in Die By The Blade as Bushido Blade. Mirror your opponent’s stance to parry them, then get them on the counter. However, there’s a slight difference with Grindstone’s game, as attacks are much swifter and there is scope for combos. And, to top that, you can dismember/behead your enemy with some very visceral sound effects.

Unfortunately, even in epic mode, the presentation isn’t great. I appreciate the characters need to be unique to one another, but they’re not memorable in the slightest. Navigating the menus and having the option for a quick play is cumbersome, but the big issue for an older gamer such as myself is the dependence on online play.

Without a campaign mode and limited single-player options, the meat and potatoes are going to be online tournaments and ranked play. Sure, you can do local tournaments, but if you don’t have any real friends, you might find this a chore early on, especially when you are limited to playing the same random matches solely to unlock XP and money for new characters and cosmetics. You need to invest quite a bit of time until you ‘get it.’

With that all out of the bag, Die By The Blade is one of my favourite modern fighters. It’s somewhat predictable that I’d give a favourable review of a game I’ve been drooling over for some time, but that’s because it does exactly what it set out to do. Granted, this style of play with one-hit-kills is a niche, but if you’re in that niche, this is the game for you.

I even chucked this on the Steam Deck, and while it’s not supermodel material and provokes RSI, I kept playing until I had to go find the charger—multiple times. Die By The Blade will undoubtedly appeal to Bushido Blade fans. I honestly hope it wins over a new legion of beat ’em up lovers, as we certainly need this sort of thing. Just ask me for some ideas on characters next time; I always have ideas.