There’s also a real weight to the meaty back-and-forth of melee combat here that you don’t necessarily find in games like Overwatch, Paladins or Apex Legends. Characters have combos, blocks and parries.
As a result, Bleeding Edge plays a lot like the kinds of character action games that the British studio are known for. While Overwatch saw Blizzard jump genres, Bleeding Edge sees Ninja Theory stick to what they know. Whether that alternative aesthetic hits more than it misses it going to vary from person to person, but I will concede that it did help make the moment-to-moment gameplay of matches feel less like the game’s obvious competitor. If the orchestral theme of Overwatch works overtime to invoke the accessible or universal heroism of Marvel’s Avengers, Bleeding Edge sweats EDM tunes, tacks on plenty of piercings and dyes its hair once a week. The sound design and sense of tone here certainly helps. Case in point: there’s a zombified voodoo doctor who has a literal snake for an arm. There are some recognisable archetypes here, but, credit where it’s due, Bleeding Edge mostly does a decent enough job of putting its own unique spin on things - even if some of the game’s characters border on parodical.
Even if some of the mechanics or abilities involved here feel like they’ve been pulled from Overwatch, most of the characters don’t. Nevertheless, when it comes to the broad strokes, the structure here doesn’t stray far from the expected.Ĭoming to things as someone who has sunk hundreds of hours into Blizzard’s class based shooter, there was a definite novelty in discovering what each character on the roster had to offer. Most characters offer a degree of utility that stretches them into more than one of the above categories. And while Bleeding Edge is a 4v4 affair rather than 6v6, comparisons to games like Overwatch really do invite themselves.ĭepending on who within the game’s (current) roster of eleven characters you choose, you’re either a tank, a healer or a damage dealer. It provides a loose justification for the action - but only if you don’t think about it too much.Īs is often the case with these kinds of games, everything else is secondary to the moment -to-moment gameplay. Each of the playable characters in the game has a backstory that you can read about in the Dojo section of the main menu but there’s not much to be said about the lore of Bleeding Edge. Set in a world where high-end body augmentation tech hits the black market, the game follows the cybernetically-empowered competitors of an underground fight club. The lore of Bleeding Edge somehow manages to be even more infuriating and barebones. If you’re one of those unsatisfied with Blizzard's (vaguely-interconnecting-yet-consistently-unsatisfying) approach to storytelling in Overwatch, then let me get ahead of the curve on this one. The first rule of cybernetic fight club…. It’s competent when it comes to covering the basics, but that's not enough.įor all its posturing, Bleeding Edge plays things too safe to keep up with the heavyweights.
Unfortunately, in addition to its own smaller shortcomings, Bleeding Edge can’t decide what it wants to be in a big picture sense. With Overwatch 2 and Riot’s Valorant looming in the distance, Bleeding Edge is Ninja Theory’s attempt to offer a slightly different take on a very familiar formula.
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