The most memorable part of Blade & Soul Table Arena wasn’t the game itself — which is a lot like Dragon Front if it leaned toward real-time strategy more than a trading card game.
Blade & Soul is a massively multiplayer online game that premiered in Korea from Ncsoft. This Table Arena game, though, is said to be using intellectual property from that world but is otherwise unconnected. The space where I picked out my creatures for battle is filled with a bunch of Amiibo-like figures. It is a rich and detailed area of the game that was an absolute feast for the eyes.
You can pull one of the figures off the shelf and place it in front of you to use as part of your team. Hold one creature in each hand and move them close together to watch them do battle. You can also power them up. It’s a very cool thing to see for anyone who likes small figures or remembers the holographic chess game from Star Wars. All of the figures on the shelves were eye-catching and uniquely designed, and I wanted to pull each one down and examine it.
The game itself was structured somewhat like Dragon Front in that you are dueling with another player and arming yourself with a set of creatures you can send into battle. I enjoyed winning a few matches as I powered up my creatures to much higher levels in the lab before each subsequent match.
Dragon Front is a cross-platform title available on both Gear VR and Rift, which can help with match-making as it widens the pool of possible players. It is unclear whether we would ever see a mobile version of Blade & Soul Table Arena — it was shown on Rift with Touch. For a game like this, launching with enough players so everyone can find challenging matches is important. Developers gave me no timeline for its possible release.
