Berserk is a long-running manga and anime that first
appeared back in 1989, primarily centred around protagonist, Guts, a soldier
for hire of exceptional strength and ability who wields an enormous sword that
is nearly as tall as him, having endured a tough and traumatic childhood, he
prefers to live and work by himself until he crosses paths with a band of
mercenaries lead by the skilled and charismatic Griffith, he convinces Guts to
join them but little does he realise this will lead them all down a path
fraught with despair and danger. Now, I’ve tried to get into Berserk on a couple of occasions
having attempted to watch the first of the Golden Age Arc films and
subsequently falling asleep, and then giving the latest animé series a chance, however
there’s something about the animation style I just don’t like, the hybrid of 2D
and 3D is nice but it just makes me feel like I’m watching a PS2-era cutscene, at
least with this new game I get a third opportunity to follow Guts’ misadventures
through all the various arcs with added interaction, and you know what they
say, third time’s a charm. Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is a hack and slash ‘Musou’
game, you’re placed in an area filled with hundreds of enemies and tasked with
carving your way through them by any means necessary, you are usually given a
mission to perform along the way, but it generally tends to be kill this person,
defend this person, or kill this group of people, none of it really very
taxing, except perhaps when you have to prevent an enemy reaching a particular
location and you’re in the centre of a fifty man mosh pit at the complete
opposite end of the map. The start of the story mode dumps you into an initially
unknown hellscape introducing you to Guts himself and the combat mechanics,
switching between normal and charge attacks into effective crowd-clearing
combos, as your combo increases this charges your Frenzy Gauge, once filled it
allows you to activate Frenzy Mode, this makes you temporarily invincible and boosts
your attack power, any kills performed in this mode raises your Death Blow
Gauge, fill that and you’ll be able to unleash a devastating attack guaranteed
to clear the heartiest of enemies, or at least take a big chunk out of a
bosses’ health bar. Once the tutorial is over we’re treated to scenes from the
anime that tell the story of how Guts joins Griffith and the titular Band of
the Hawk, this continues through the entire Golden Age arc, after that the
story plays out through in-game models and locations but given how the latest
animé looks I actually found myself preferring this way.
The character models and level of detail are great, even populating
each map with hundreds of enemies at a time or launching huge attacks that can
send tons of limbs and blood galore flying everywhere there’s no sign of any
obvious drop in frame rate, and trust me the gore is here in literal
bucket-loads, which coming from the ultra-violent source material, fans will
not be disappointed. After our brief exposition and interlude in actual
interaction it’s onto more battles, initially you only control Guts but as you
progress more characters become available to play, and the more you use each
one the more they level up, increasing their stats and adding extra combos into
their repertoire, though like myself, you’ll likely find one combo that’s the
most effective and keep spamming that ad infinitum.
During your fights as well as gaining XP you’ll also be
awarded power ups to increase your health and temporarily boost your attack and
defence, as well as new weapons and items that can be equipped to add extra
levels to your character’s stats or improve things like aerial attack range, or
guard ability, jewels can also be obtained and used in the shop to enhance
these items further with extra benefits unlocking the further you go. After each battle it’s over to a stage select screen of
sorts, this gives the choice of replaying a level to beat previous scores or
unlock secret items you may have missed the first time around, but there’s also
a strange feature here called “Event”, this contains short moments between
characters, often just spoken, of insight into the prior mission, current happenings
within the storyline, or additional areas of character development and
background. There are over seventy characters available to play from the
Berserk universe, including alternative versions of Guts, Griffith, and Casca
etc.… but asides from the larger monster characters, the difference between
them is minimal, apart from their secondary weapons, and levels in health,
attack, and defence, they each control similarly and whilst Serpico might be
considerably less sluggish to move than Wyald, you’ll always find yourself
using the same combo over and over only punctuated by a tap of the dash button
to dart out of the way of an incoming enemy strike, before carrying on your
barrage. Anyone who has played a Musou-style game before will
recognise the control layout and easily get into cutting through the crowds in
no time, however B&TBOTH also adds horse riding to traverse some of the
areas, this works well mostly, once you’ve gathered some speed your horse can
plough through most enemies without blinking an eye, this can be tremendously
helpful among big crowds, however getting on and off your stead proved a little
awkward with the mount button being the same as the dash, if you weren’t stood
completely still next to your horse your character would dart forward and cost
you valuable time, annoying. As much fun as cutting a swathe through the countless bad
guys to make your way through the stages can be, severing limbs and appendages
in a shower of blood with a flurry of your blades, it soon becomes quite samey,
for a bit of variation I thought I’d take a look at the Endless Eclipse mode,
but it turns out that is basically a survival mode, you progress deeper through
stages of increasingly harder enemies, and the deeper you go, the better the
items you’ll gain to take with you back into the Campaign, all the hack’n’slash
minus the story, and in this game, sadly the story is the best bit. I tried to like Berserk and the Band of the Hawk, but the
moments between the animé and story sequences where you’re actually fighting
can drag on and get boring, and I found myself just wanting to watch those more
than I did playing the game itself, having played the One Piece: Pirate
Warriors series and Hyrule Warriors, what are essentially the same game albeit
with a different theme and lick of paint, these titles were series I’m already
a fan of and everything about them is made to appeal to like-minded
individuals, for this reason I think that’s why I found myself not enjoying
this quite as much. I’m sure fans of Berserk will love this game, it looks and
sounds great, and is possibly one of the most faithful renderings of any animé and manga, and that’s the draw really I suppose, it may be a little shallow but
it’s there to appeal to the fans of the massively popular series, for the
uninitiated though, it does tell a great story, if a little dark in places, but
that story is broken up by sections of gameplay that get repetitive quickly,
worth a look if you’ve not played this style of game before but hard to
recommend if you have.
Berserk and the Band of the Hawk is out for Playstation 4 and Vita on 24/02/17