Blade Assault – Definitive Beginners Guide

This is a small guide to help you to understand some of the basics of this game.

Ultimate Newbies Guide

All credit goes to FlintWestwood!

Basics

Here we will talk about the basics of upgrades and go into detail more as we go down the line.

At the beginning of each run, you must chose a weapon, from 3 (currently) available: the chainsaw (which you start with), the axe and the assault rifle.

Each weapon has different a different playstyle and different passive upgrades, but they all share 3 elements:fire, ice and lightning.

• Fire: Places a dot on the enemies you attack. At a certain amount of stacks, the targeted enemy bursts into an explosion that deals significant damage.
• Ice: Each attack on the enemy has the chance to freeze it. This effect doesn’t work on bosses.If the target is not frozen when you attack it, it will just be slowed (this one works on bosses).
• Lightning: Every attack launches a small lightning bolt to the other enemies around your target and has a chance to shock them, making them unable to move and interrupting their attacks (shock doesn’t work on bosses).

The goal is to go as fast as you can through each stage and reach the “final” boss (of the early access in which this guide was made) of the run. Each stage has 8 levels, which are divided in 2 zones. Once you have gone through 4 stages, you will be sent in a in between hub area where you can buy food to regen hp, lower the wanted level and buy rarer upgrades. Once you are at level 8, you will fight a boss, which drops certain resources like friendship cubes and upgrade chips that you need back at base.

Got it? Good, time to go into more detail.

Weapons

As I said in the beginning, there are currently 3 weapons. Let’s talk in detail about them.

The Chainsaw

The chainsaw is the weapon which you start with, being a balance between speed and range. It’s skill is to jump forward while spinning, dealing damage to every enemy it hits. These are the passives available to chose from:

• Fierce attack: Your normal attack has increased attack speed, up to 12% at max rank.
• Critical combo: After hitting an enemy with a skill, all your weapon (keep this in mind) attacks will have increased crit rate for 7 seconds by 16% at max rank.
• Energy drain: Everytime your normal attack crits, you gain 20 bonus energy.

The chainsaw is basically the jack of all trades. Compared to the axe, it lacks damage in early, but makes up for it in mobility and versatility. I recommend you stick to this one until you get a feel for the game. Or don’t, it’s up to you.

The Axe

The axe boasts tons of early damage in exchange for attack speed and mobility. This can hit really hard on elites and bosses, as well as clearing mobs with its base skill, Axe throw. You throw the axe and it ricochets around like thor’s hammer (if you played hades and used the shield, you know what I’m talking about). Here are the passives:

• Concentrate: Reduces the chargeup time by 1 second(at max rank) of the charged attack and increases it damage by 100%(at max rank).
• Surging strike: Each time your axe hits an enemy, your damage is increased by 30% (at max rank. I don’t know how long it lasts or how much you can stack it, as I don’t play this weapon that much).
• Giant axe: The more health you have, the more damage your axe deals, up to 15% of your max health (at max rank).

The axe is more for the players who know how to time their attacks. The throw leaves you unable to use normal attacks until it returns and the charge attack just isn’t that great if you can’t position to hit the most of the enemies at once. But, the damage still makes it a good weapon.

The Assault Rifle

The AR is good if you like to keep your distance. It’s charged attack is a powerful shot that can pierce enemies. It’s skill is to throw projectiles like grenades in front of you while knocking you back from danger. The passives are as follows:

• Supply energy: Each time you kill an enemy, you get more energy.
• Composed fire: The further away you are from the guy you are trying to shoot, the more damage you will do to them, up to 100% (at max rank).
• Frenzied firing: When you hit an enemy with a skill, you gain increased attack and movement speed for 5 seconds.

Note: The first and last passive I haven’t yet maxed, as I just started playing with this weapon.

The AR is good-ish?

Hear me out, there are instances when this weapon can deal 3k damage per crit and sometimes, when the barrel of the weapon is on top of your enemy, your attacks don’t even touch them. I can’t say this is the best weapon ever, as you need to reload it (like the gun from hades) and, well, it doesn’t offer much interesting gameplay. You just stand as far away and shoot at the enemies.

Skills, Upgrades and Subweapons

Now, there is some things to talk about here, but not that many on each one to make a subsection for each individually, so here we go.

Skills

As you play, you will come across some gold coins. These are used at the base where you can upgrade your damage and health (as of writing this guide). These can increase normal attack, skill attack, more damage to elites, more hp, less damage taken etc. These are up to you to decide, as your playstyle influences this more than anything else. You upgrade this skill tree by using gold coins.

Upgrades

As the same with coins, you will encounter roses, which you use at Hank to get a new passive on your weapon. These differ when it comes to each weapon, but these upgrades can also change your skill to do something totally different (i.e change the axe throw to making the player spin in a circle with it). Note that these upgrades and roses disappear as soon as you die and your run is over. If you have a friendship upgrade at hank, he can let you upgrade your weapon before a run with 1 out of 3 upgrades in exchange for 10 golden coins.

Subweapons

The subweapon is a skill that you start with and it takes energy to use. It just shoots a ball of energy that deals damage. You can change this by going to upgrades like fire, ice, lightning that will change it completely. Here are some of those I encountered:

• A flamethrower.
• A projectile shooter that shoots fire balls. Upgrading it increases the number of fireballs being shot.
• A ball of lightning that shocks.
• A ball of lightning that does more damage to shocked/frozen enemies.
• A ball of ice that freezes enemies.

Elements

Now, I told you about the 3 elements, but let’s go into detail on each one. Before I get into it, you must know that each weapon can get these elements. In order for that to happen, you must find an upgrade that looks like a diamond (?) shape and depending on it’s colour (orange, yellow, blue), you might get a thing called a weapons core for that element. This makes it so that your weapon’s normal attack and skill to have that element. Got it? Good. Let’s keep going.

Fire

Fire is the only dot (damage over time) type damage in the game when it comes to consistent application of it (there is also an item that applies a dot, but it’s chance based, so there’s that).

Fire has some interesting upgrades, which I can’t tell from memory their names, so I’m going to name some of the most I’ve seen:

• Increase the damage you deal.
• Increase the burn damage your dot deals.
• Decrease the tick rate (meaning the duration between each tick of damage i.e.: instead of 1 damage teak every second it can go to 1 tick every half of second, depending on it’s rarity and level).
• After using a skill, you summon tracking fireballs that go to the closest enemies.
• Reduce the amount of stacks needed to make the enemies explode and make said explosion deal more damage(this one is a legendary, so you might have a hard time finding it).
• Increase the number of stacks you can put on one enemy as well as the damage of the dot (legendary).

The hyper core makes your guy do an uppercut that ignites enemies it touches.

Note: The dash doesn’t count as every element has a different type of dodge that can do pretty much the same but having different elements.

Fire is the most reliable element in my opinion as its dot can be applied on every enemy, no matter if it’s an elite or a boss. I would recommend you try to stick to this one, but if you didn’t find one and you are like at stage 3 (which happened to me once), then I suggest you get any kind of core.

Ice

Ice is one of the two elements that can CC an enemy (CC=crowd control), that isn’t the boss. Some of the upgrades that Ice can give you are as follows:

• Frost arrows that attack enemies after you give them some seconds to appear (which can be upgraded into Frost javelins (forgot name) that pierce through enemies).
• Increased crit chance/damage against frozen enemies.
• Reduced damage taken from enemies.
• A shield that procs when you get hit, which is a portion of your max hp. The shield doesn’t disappear until it is broken, but it has a cooldown before it can appear again.

The hypercore turns you into a statue of ice. While frozen, you regen a portion of your hp, and after the duration is over, you explode out of it and freeze any nearby enemies. Be wary that this one has a 2 minute cooldown (but cooldowns reset after each level).

I would say ice is the best elite destroyer. If you have the increased crit against frozne guys, you can easily delete them. Ice also makes you more tanky, which is nice when you don’t really know the attack patern of many enemies when you get to new zones.

Lightning

Lightning, or electricity if you want, is the other element that can CC your enemies, as well as make them take increased damage from certain sources when they are shocked. It also makes your attacks create electric bolts that jump to enemies close to the ones you attack. Here are some of it’s upgrades:

• Increased crit chance/damage for your weapon.
• Energy regen.
• Increased crit chance based on your current energy level.
• Increases the number of bounces of electric bolts.
• The “No u” (jk), the passive ability that when you get hit, the enemy that attacked you gets struck by lightning.

The hypercore makes you fly into the air than slam down, after which a lightning storm continues to hit enemies with lightning bolts from the sky, following you along the way.

Lightning is the best add clear (add=small enemies that spawn in great numbers) for the whole game. The ability to just shock enemies and focus on more important targets it’s pretty good. The whole crit bonus is pretty nice, and it doesn’t require you to have them in a certain state for it to proc. But, like Ice, it doesn’t shock bosses, which is sad.

If I were to rank them by my prefferances (when it comes to which weapon core I chose), it would be: Fire, Lightning and Ice, but you can play with whatever you want as long as it matches your playstyle.

Tips

I will try to give you some tips on how I make my runs last longer, but don’t take them as “The only way to play this game”.

So,  for starters:

• Thieve’s glove is pretty good. It has a 1.5% to give you extra gems when you hit an enemy.
• Don’t underestimate the cheese. It’s an epic item that makes it so enemies have a 1% chance to drop a piece of cheese that restores 5 health. That sound like nothing, but if you upgrade it a few times to give you like 10 health/cheese, it’s decent and can save your runs.
• Fast as ♥♥♥ boi. The faster you clear your stages, the slower the danger meter fills up.
• Give money to the hacker. The hacker (i forgot his name) can lower your danger level in exchange for gems. I usually do this in later stages of the run to help me, as I don’t really need gems at that part of the run.