Blazing Strike Comes Out With Mixed Reviews

After so many years, Blazing Strike is finally out, but the experience is anything but triumphant.

At the moment, the game sits at 46% positive reviews, and more alarmingly, there are only 26 reviews in total. You might think, "so what, some people just don't review games" and you'd be right, but after years of having access to Steam's API, people figured out that the number of reviews is a somewhat accurate estimation of how well the game sold.

It's unlikely that Blazing Strike made any noteworthy sales, and one of the bigger culprits behind it is... well, it's the price. The regional pricing is excellent, and the game asks for mere 10 to 20 dollars in most of the world, the price in US is sitting at 40 dollars.

Needless to say, that's not an easy purchase for many fighting game fans to justify when they can spend a little more and get games that offer much more and have an established playerbase to fight with.

The overall rough state of the game doesn't help either. Reviews often point out the frustrating training mode, which lacks many features people have come to expect, and fails at a fundamental level by making training options only accessible before you actually launch the training mode.

But that's not all. There's also a basic arcade mode that simply gives you a series of CPU battles with no boss battle in sight. Even the game's story mode falls short, since the lack of saves demands that you finish it in one sitting.

The gameplay aspect was much less criticized, but even then, the game is catching some flack for trying to stick to the old school roots while also applying modern design sensibilities with the Rush system that governs much of what you can do.

As a result, the game is currently sitting at a peak of 10 concurrent players.

It always feels bad to watch an indie game perform so poorly, especially one that many of us were eagerly following throughout the years. However, it's not entirely unwarranted, and we don't know how difficult the development has been or how deadlines could've impeded the final result.

The game still promises two more free DLC characters, so we can certainly expect some updates. Hopefully they can also lift the game to a much better state along the way.