Ayumi is a lithe, leaping, treasure hunting girl who plunders ancient ruins for powerful artifacts. Sound familiar? Ah, but you see she's very different to Lara. Ayumi wears far fewer clothes for starters: forget tight shorts, she plumps for a cheese-wire thong under her patchy sections of plate armour. All this is rendered in Anime style, so expect the usual prominent large eyes and... other features.

As you can guess from the name, X-Blades is all about the combat rather than puzzles or platform leaping (though there are elements of the latter). The eponymous blades are razor sharp swords with built-in guns, so Ayumi can slash in melee or blast opponents at range. She also has access to a library of spells which can be purchased using the game's currency, the souls of those you've killed (and you thought fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking were immoral).

A combat oriented game lives or dies by its fighting system, and there's more good than bad here. The controls are easy to pick up, with one button for jumping, one for slashing and other buttons that can be custom mapped to the various spells. An auto-targeting system works reasonably well for long-range blasting.

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Overall, it's a fairly neat scheme which keeps the fast moving action flowing nicely. If there's one weakness, it's that X-Blades errs a little on the button mashing side; you won't fare too badly just hammering attack and flailing around with the left analogue stick. Having said that, an attempt to introduce intricacies is made with the abilities of the game's monsters.

Each beast has different powers and weaknesses, so some will chuck fireballs at you which have to be leapt over, and will be invulnerable to melee but particularly damaged by ice spells. Other monsters have group powers, such as phantom ghosts who try to link energy together in a pentagram. If you let five of them link up, they'll catch you in a net of negative matter that seriously damages the old health bar.

But despite these twists, and some fun spells (teleporting behind enemies and back-stabbing them is a laugh), X-Blades lost our interest fairly early on, mainly thanks to a lack of imagination in the encounter design. The game makes you fight wave after wave of the same monsters, which have to be killed over and over, and over, and over again. And this starts to get tiresome quite quickly.

It gets worse, too, as you have to retrace your steps through certain maps and play them all over again, which feels like a very cheap way of bulking up the gameplay hours. Unfortunately, the limb-rending action wasn't good enough to hold our interest in the face of this.

Despite a decent combat and spell upgrade system, the blades of this hack-and-slasher are soon dulled by its drawn-out encounters and repetitive levels.