Blades of Vengeance

The first screen throws you into a medieval fantasy world already soaked in blood—your character, one of three vengeful swordsmen, is ready to carve through anything that moves. Blades of Vengeance is a side-scrolling action game from Krome Studios Melbourne, released in 1993 for the Sega Mega Drive under Electronic Arts' banner. It's the kind of game that arrived when the 16-bit console wars were in full swing and every publisher wanted their own slice of the action-platformer pie.

You pick one of three warriors, each with their own weapon style and slightly different move sets, then proceed through a series of levels populated by orcs, demons, and generic fantasy trash. The setup is bare-bones—no complex story, no character development. Just point yourself forward, slash everything, and reach the exit. It's straightforward in the way early nineties action games understood straightforward: momentum and reaction time matter more than puzzle-solving or exploration.

The combat feels solid enough for its era. Your sword connects with weight, enemies respond to hits, and there's a genuine rhythm to chaining attacks. The platforming sections break things up without overstaying their welcome—jumping between platforms while dodging projectiles, nothing revolutionary. What works against the game is its punishing difficulty curve and occasionally awkward hitbox placement that makes certain jumps feel less forgiving than they should be. The animation is clean, though, and the Mega Drive's color palette handles the dark medieval aesthetic without muddying everything into brown soup the way some of its contemporaries did.

By 1993 standards, this was competent work—Australian developers proving they could deliver a polished action game for a major publisher. It never reached the legendary status of something like Sonic or Castlevania IV, but it wasn't meant to. It was filler in EA's library, a game designed to scratch an itch for twenty minutes on a Saturday afternoon before you moved on to something else. The problem is that it was designed purely for that moment. Strip away the novelty of a new Mega Drive game in 1993, and you're left with a competent but forgettable platformer with nothing particular to say.

Today, Blades of Vengeance sits in that strange middle ground where it's neither difficult enough to feel like a genuine challenge nor easy enough to coast through. It's the gaming equivalent of a solid supporting actor—reliable, occasionally impressive, immediately forgotten. If you've got an afternoon and want to see what an Australian studio could pull off in the early nineties, it's worth a run through your browser. Just don't expect it to stick with you once the credits roll.