Talon’s Blade Review (PC): Dark Souls Meets Kingdom Come in a Fun and Janky Way

Talon’s Blade is a game that takes the fun exploration and brutal nature of Dark Souls and combines it with the directional combat of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The world is vast and explorable, and the combat is unique and punishing if you don’t get it down. Unfortunately, the same parts of the game that stand out are also what bring the game down. Everything is fun on the surface level, but once you get into the meat of it, you come away quite disappointed.

Trial by fire

Talon’s Blade’s combat system focuses on using a combination of Soulslike mechanics with dodge rolls and parrying, combined with the directional inputs of Kingdom Come: Deliverance to create a unique form of fighting that can take a while to get used to. During my first run of the game, this system, despite its quirks, felt very intuitive. I even managed to start parrying enemies before the tutorial taught me how.

Along with standard blade fighting, you get access to magic. If you perform a combo, there is a split second you can activate magic spells that can alter the fight in your favor. My personal favorite allows you to stop enemies in their tracks, holding them in a stasis field while you get to pummel them mercilessly. All of these little mechanics make the combat fun and often silly, which I genuinely enjoyed.

The downside of the combat system is that it is often too easy and can be tricked with simple actions. Along with this, the damage numbers are inconsistent, leading to deaths that you don’t see coming, or you slaughtering an entire group of enemies in one hit. I’d often find myself in the middle of a group of enemies. I would swing my blade, which was one I stuck with from one of the early-game bosses, and it would take out every enemy in a single hit. The same blade would then have an issue killing one enemy who was the same as the others, leading to me hacking away at him for a solid minute before landing the final blow.

Boss encounters showcased this issue the worst. Multiple boss fights would go by where I would die because one hit would take me from half health to dead. The next time I fought the boss, the same attack would only do a small amount of damage. The same could be said about my attacks. Multiple bosses were felled by my blade with an attack that somehow took away a quarter of their health at the end, when previously the attacks did smaller damage.

Parrying was my best friend at the beginning of the game, but after a while, I opted to ignore the mechanic and focus on non-stop attacks. This is because parrying seemed pointless. Many times, it led to me getting a riposte which did little damage and felt like it wasn’t worth the effort. Instead, I found that it was better to simply tank the attack and go in for the kill. This led to me dealing more damage every time, and the trade-off was often a small amount of health that I could always get back thanks to my big collection of health potions.

A vast world

The world of Talon’s Blade is a bit of a double-edged sword. It is worth exploring and rewards you for doing so by allowing you to interact with NPCs, find side quests, and discover new bosses. Along your journey, you can also collect herbs to help you craft potions, which means I was grabbing everything I could get my hands on. While one side of the sword is great for cutting, the other side will cut you, and I learned that the hard way.

Talon’s Blade’s world is fun to explore, but it also has some major negatives. For starters, the damage numbers seem wildly inconsistent. One minute I could be jumping off a small ledge and take almost no damage. The next minute, I could jump off a ledge of similar height, and a quarter of my health bar would be gone. This often confused me, but it didn’t put much of a damper on things.

The more annoying parts of the world shine through inconsistent character interactions, a lack of dialogue with NPCs, and an overwhelming number of resources that trivialize the game. I often found that my character would hit invisible walls or get caught on a piece of the environment or bounce off something in a random direction. While I could also interact with NPCs, it felt almost pointless because I often couldn’t choose a dialogue option. Instead, one option appeared, giving me the opportunity to select the one option I could say. If that is going to be an option in the game, I’d personally rather see more dialogue options or just let me listen to what the NPCs say without a chance to respond. Finally, the number of plants for alchemy found throughout the game trivialized it for me. I found that I had a surplus of health elixirs, making damage feel almost pointless cause I could just heal through it.

The verdict

Overall, Talon’s Blade is a fun game that those who enjoy RPGs and Soulslikes can get behind. It has a higher level of jankiness than I expected based on the short demo that I played previously, with wildly inconsistent damage numbers, getting stuck in animations, and colliding with random invisible walls. The combat is fun and offers a good degree of difficulty for those who are new to Souls games, but if you have experience, you may be able to fly through most of the game, getting stopped at only a few points, like I did. 

Talon’s Blade was reviewed on PC with a code provided by Soulware.

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