2019-01-12 01:20:48 (edited by SLJ 2019-01-13 17:54:41)

Wulverblade: game guide.

Link to the discussion topic about the game and about the guide, where you can leave your feedback:
http://forum.audiogames.net/post/404709/#p404709

Please note: The guide is not finished yet. More information will be added soon.

Introduction.

Welcome to a guide for blind people, explaining how to play the game called Wulverblade. The goal with this guide is that blind people can pick up the game, read the guide and start playing right away, without asking any sighted person to help them get started.

Wulverblade is a playable 2.5 D hack and slash game, which in my opinion offers a lot of gameplay for blind people. The game has been released on the following platforms:
Nintendo Switch, Ps4, Xbox One and for pc via Steam. If you enjoy hack and slash games, then this game is for you.

The games story:
Its 120AD and the Roman army have seized control of the south of Britannia. Their goal, to march north and conquer the rest of the island with brutal and bloody efficiency. The 5000 strong 9th Legion are preparing for war, but little do they know what lies in wait for them. Caradoc, a guardian of the northern tribes has rallied the war bands and is ready to bring the war to the Romans. Caradoc bares a gift that even he is not aware of. And soon, the Ninth Legion will discover its true power.

The game have the following features:
Old school arcade, side scrolling beat-em-up action
8 beautiful levels spanning ancient forests, thundering rivers, torchlit woodlands & Roman forts. All based on real locations
Stunning 1080p HD artwork & cell animated characters
Atmospheric soundtrack fit for a blockbuster movie
An engrossing story that combines ancient British history with native tales of lore
Amazing unlockable features that leave you eager to play again!
Read more and find the game for your platform on the following website:
http://wulverblade.com

The menus.

The menus do not wrap, which makes them very easy to navigate.
The menu navigation sounds are interesting. They seem to change randomly when navigating through the menu items.
The controller vibrates when entering some of the  sections of the menus, which is an interesting and sometimes helpful feature.

The main menu:

The main menu goes from left to right.
Campaign
Arenas
Options
Extras

Campaign.

The campaign menu goes from left to right.
Standard
Arcade (You have three lives in the campaign mode)
An empty spot which unlocks when you beat the game for the first time. I'll let you figure that out for yourself, because I won't spoil anything in this guide. Please note: The empty slot is not reachable by using the arrow keys. It's only visible on the screen, but will be reachable by using the arrow keys as the third item when available.

Choosing the Arcade mode brings you to the character screen.
Choosing the Standard mode asks for the difficulty level.
The difficulty level menu goes up/down, and only have two choices: The first choice is normal, and the last choice is easy.
After you have chosen your difficulty level, you will be at the character screen.

The character selection screen.

This menu goes from left to right.
Caradoc
Brennus
Guinevere

When you have chosen a character, it is being shown on the screen, and you have to press confirm again to continue.

The stage selection screen.

This screen is quite interesting. It gives you a map of the stages which you can navigate. When entering the stage screen, the cursor is automatically on the latest stage you can play. That means: If you have not  completed stage 1, the cursor is automatically on stage one. If you have completed a stage, the cursor will automatically be on the next stage.

You can navigate the map by using the arrow keys. Please note that the cursor works like a mouse with free movement. But, as soon as the cursor goes over a spot you can choose, you will hear the menu selection sound.

Tips for navigation: You can hold down an arrow key for five seconds to reach the edge of the stage screen, but this makes no sound. Then you can hold an other arrow key down for five seconds and listen for the menu selection sound. If there is no sound, then you can press either the up or down arrow once, and then continue left or right again. In this way, the stage selection screen is navigateable, but it is not easy.
If you mess up, you can always go back to the main menu and try again.

So, why is navigating the stage selection screen important?
Next to some of the stages, when they have been unlocked, there is an extra movie, with narration, telling the original story from the real location in England. Those movies are quite awesome to watch.

There are 8 stages in total, but you can't count the stages on the stage selection screen because of the extra movies.

Options.

Music (Left right slider)
Sound effects (Left right slider)
Voices (Left right slider)
The rest of the menu items are on/off toggles. You simply toggle them on and off by pressing confirm.
Tint Dead Enemies
Show overhead captions
Vibration: On by default.
Language: Switches between English and an other language which I don't know by pressing confirm. Please note: The text in the menus does also change.
Change controller settings
Switch User

Extras menu.

The Extras menu is as follows:

History & story.
Armoury
Media.
Achievements.
Leaderboards.
Credits.

Please note:
History & story, armoury and media are exactly the same menus which you can reach from the pause menu.
The achievements menu is not accessible. But if you are playing on the Xbox, all the achievements are completely accessible from the original achievements list. Just like all other games on your console.
If you are playing on the Playstation, you can read all the achievements on the Playstation website, or by using the Playstation app for Smartphones.
I'm not sure on if the Leaderboards also are taking directly from the Live account feature, or if it's an other leaderboard feature directly build into the game.

The pause menu.

Resume game
Options
Controls
Unlocks
Restart level
Return to map
Exit to main menu.

Unlocks.

History and story.
Armoury
Media.
Please note: In those menus, the menu items are in multiple columns. You choose a section with the up or down arrow keys, and then you count through the parts of the chosen section by pressing the right arrow. Then you press confirm to watch the selected item, if it has been unlocked.

The history and story section contains a ton of text based information. You can use OCR to read that.

The media section is quite interesting. In here, you can re-watch all the movies you have unlocked through the campain.

The gameplay.

First I thought the game was unplayable, but after a while, I have found some ways to overcome most of the challenges in the game.

The game is a 2.5D sidescroller game. That means you can go left and right, and in and out of the screen. It feels like forward and backwards, or up and down if you will. The great thing is that the areas are quite small in the game. Because of that, the game is fully playable, but can be a bit tricky to navigate in some areas.

You can hear your footsteps when walking. However, the footsteps do not stop when you walk into a wall or other objects. That makes the game challenging to navigate, but there are workarounds, which I'll do my best to explain.

All the areas are so small, so you can walk from one end to the other by holding the key or stick down for 20 seconds. This is quite important to remember, since you might feel lost and a bit frustrated in some of the areas where it can be difficult to navigate. Because of the continues walking sound, it can be difficult to know when you have reached a wall or an object. But after having completed the campaign, I can tell you that I haven't seen any big areas. When I got lost at all the frustrating places, it was just a matter of being patient, and look carefully after the next exit.

Most of the times, you have to go right to continue. At some places you need to jump, or smash some objects. I hope my tips helps regarding to navigating, cause they can be a bit frustrating, because you can get the feeling that you don't know what you're doing. Don't give up, because it is very much worth it to complete this amazing campaign...

At some places, there are exits leading to an other room. If you listen very carefully, you might hear a small pause in the background sounds, in the footsteps or notice that you can't jump or attack for a moment. This is because you are on your way into an other room. Those exits can be in the walls in the north, south, east or the west wall. At one or two places, there is an exit in the middle of nowhere. I had a lot of trouble finding this exit.

Here is what you can do if you are totally stuck and unable to continue:
1. Jump along the walls to see if you can jump over something to continue.
2. Navigate grid by grid while pressing the attack button. In this way, you will make sure you find and smash every destructable objects. This is sometimes important, because some of those objects leads to an exit. Yes, the character does actually go in the direction you push the analog stick or the arrow key.
3. In one of the stages, you actually need to smash your way through to continue.
4. If you go backwards while keep jumping, you will kind of crash into the wall. When you do that, you know you have reached the wall.

The controls.

Here are the controls which I currently know, and which I have managed to figure out what does. I will update this section as soon as I get more information or figure something out.

The controls comes in the following order: Xbox and Playstation.
Please note:
1. I have not tested the Playstation version, so I'm not sure on those controls.
2. I haven't tested the pc version.
3. I know nothing about the Nintendo Switch.
4. I can't do OCR on the controls menu. I might get sighted help to read those.
5. I can't find anything at all on the internet regarding the controls. So you might imagine it has been a challenge for me. smile
6. Some of the controls might be wrong. If that's the case, then please correct me with the right information.

A, X: Jump. Pressing twice makes a double jump.
Y, Square: Strong attack, and the action button.
X, Triangle: Attack.
B, Circle: Used for blocking. Please note: You can't hear when you need to block, so you kind of have to guess that.
LB, L2: Rage. Not totally sure on what it does.
RB, R2: Call the wolfs to help in the battles. I haven't fully figured out how that works yet.
RT, R1: Used to run. I'm not sure on where this is useful.
LT, L1: The controls says run. I haven't got that to work yet.

Fighting.

I find fighting very challenging in this game, even on the easy difficulty level. I'll try to explain how I manage to do it.

Please note:
1. The enemies can be very difficult to hear. I recommend you to turn down the music to very low, otherwise you might find the game impossible to play.
2. You can not hear what direction the enemies are coming from. The workaround for this is to attack in all four directions, most of the times left and right, until you hit the enemy. When you have got used to it, you can easily feel by the vibration in the controller that you are attacking an enemy. You can also easily hear that, but it's sometimes easier to feel in the vibration than hear it in the big battles, or when people are talking.
3. The enemies are very quiet. That means you won't hear them before they attack you if you're not careful. Sometimes an enemy is standing still and doing nothing. You can not continue if you haven't killed all the enemies in the section you are in. So if you can't continue, it is worth checking if an enemy is standing somewhere, ready to be sliced so you can continue on your way.
4. The enemies with bows are the most difficult and most annoying enemies for us to deal with. They simply keep firing at you, until they are killed. They are usually standing at one spot, keeping firing at you from the distance. Other times, they are hiding behind some objects which you need to smash before you can reach them. They can be extremely annoying. I can't count how many times I have died because of those small beasts. smile
5. The big enemies with shields can be very tough as well. But I don't find them being as much annoying as the bow shooters. Sighted people will feel different because the bow shooters are very easy to kill as soon as you have found them, and the enemies wielding shields are generally very tough, but you can easily tell where they are because of the close combat, making them less annoying than the bow shooters in my opinion. But, trust me: They do kill you if you're not careful... smile

The arenas.

When you choose The Arenas, you have to choose the stage you wanna play. They are as follows:

Highlands. Dangerous: Spikes.
Rocky cliffs. Dangerous: Spikes.
Roundhouse. Dangerous: Open fire.
Village. Dangerous: Open fires, spikes.
Stone circle.
Tower Courtyard.
Roman fort.

When you have chosen your stage, you have to choose your character, and the arena loads like the campaign.

The arena is in multiple waves. Some special music is playing when a wave has been completed, so you can count and tell what number wave you are in.

Unlocks and achievements.

The game have a lot of achievements. Most of them are accessible, if you are good enough at the game. Other achievements seems to either require some sight, or just extremely much patience.

Final words.

Thank you for reading my guide on how to play the game.
I have done my very best to figure out how to play the game, to overcome the different challenges and to include as much accessible and playable stuff in the guide as possible.

My goal is to have everything playable from the game described in this guide, so people don't have to figure it all out on their own. My goal is that people can buy this game, read this guide and play right away without any sighted help at all.

If you find something wrong, incorrect, any mistakes, anything playable or doable which is not described in this guide or if you have any suggestions on how to improve the guide, then please let me know.

I hope you find this guide useful, and enjoy playing the game. Happy gaming, and happy slaughtering...

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
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