Naraka: Bladepoint

Network problems come up in 13% of reviews with real text. Players describe a combat system built on frame-tight timing that falls apart over the network: parries that flash red but do not register, hits that land through a dodge, lag spikes and disconnects mid-fight, and a reconnect flow that dumps them on an "account error" screen and forces a restart. Players far from the few server locations (Oceania, South America, the Middle East, India, South Africa, Central Asia) say combos and parries turn into guesswork above roughly 100 ms. On EU and NA servers the recurring grievance is opponents from other regions with very high ping who are hard to hit, and 18 reviews mention or ask for a region lock or ping cap. A few veterans add that animation speed scales with frame rate, so a faster CPU wins exchanges. Most of these reviews come from veterans, with a median of 97 hours.

Bots come up in 11% of reviews with real text. New players on non-Asian servers report winning their first matches and then realizing nearly every opponent was a bot, with bots filling quick play and even ranked lobbies until roughly Platinum or Solar; a few call the player count fake. How the bots fight draws its own complaints: easy bots walk into walls, while hard and high-rank bots parry every charged attack with inhuman timing, gang up on players and appear with full gear. Some players defend bots as a gentle on-ramp and use bot mode to practice. Others want fewer bots in competitive matches, none in ranked, or, as one review asks, "Bots being marked as bots."

After coasting through bot lobbies, players around Platinum and Solar are matched into "champion" lobbies of top-ranked veterans, sometimes 400 or more rating points above them, and are eliminated before they land a hit. Players say there is "no middle ground" to learn in and that they meet the same few top players every match, while smurf accounts and server-hopping veterans make low-rank and casual lobbies worse. One veteran notes that ranked points are so lenient "it is really easy to hit Plat+," so nearly everyone ends up in those lobbies regardless of skill. Most of these complaints come from players with 50 or more hours.

Cheating comes up in 8% of reviews with real text. Players describe auto-parry and auto-combo scripts, stagger immunity, wallhacks and teleporting, plus teaming in solo queues, and say reporting is too hard: there is no way to report from a match replay, support asks for video evidence, and nothing visible happens afterward. The developers' weekly ban lists are cited both as proof of effort and as proof of how many cheaters there are. A few veterans with thousands of hours dispute the scale (one has "rarely encountered obvious cheaters") and say many suspected cheaters are simply skilled or low-ping players.

The anti-cheat asks players to disable Windows memory integrity (HVCI) or core isolation, and the most upvoted negative reviews in the slice are about exactly that: 10 of the 12 most upvoted. Twenty-two reviews repeat nearly the same sentence, that the game asks you to "disable HVCI which protects your kernal memory from having malicious code inserted." Many of these players refuse and uninstall within minutes, and some call the game spyware. About a third of the reviews raising the anti-cheat come from players under two hours. The reviews disagree on the facts: several players, including multi-thousand-hour veterans, say the requirement was removed or only appears on certain setups, while others report still seeing the prompt, security software flagging the anti-cheat driver, or being unable to remove it after uninstalling. Waves of these reviews appear from late 2023 through 2025.

Outside Asia, players say the game feels empty: ranked queues of 10 to 30 minutes above Solar, queues that time out outside peak hours, PvE and side modes that never fill, and NA and EU leaderboards that feel like a small circle of regulars. A few blame the lack of western marketing; one recommending player wishes the game could "receive some proper marketing in the west." A few others point out that it is far more popular in China.

Stutter and frame drops in crowded fights, even on high-end hardware, lead the performance complaints, along with a CPU-bound engine that ignores graphics settings, heavy GPU load even in menus, crashes and freezes, games that hang on the "tap to start" screen, and an effective requirement for an SSD. Frequent patches of 10 to 30 GB that seem to re-download much of the game irritate players on slower connections, and some say specific updates made optimization worse. A minority report smooth performance, including on Linux and Steam Deck.

Newer players in particular describe the menus as a maze: dozens of currencies, red notification dots, event and reward screens to click through, shop offers everywhere, and an "are you sure?" prompt on exit. Several compare it to a mobile game and say they spend more time in menus than in matches.

A smaller group reports bans they say were wrong: triggered by leftover tools such as Cheat Engine, overlay or crosshair apps, internet cafes, or accounts hijacked by third parties, with appeals answered by automated or scripted replies. Some had bans lifted only after persistent tickets. Others describe unhelpful support over purchases and missing rewards, and players who spent money on Xbox or PlayStation resent the lack of cross-progression with Steam.

Some players who bought the game before it went free-to-play in 2023 want their money back or say the compensation was not enough. Others say the compensation gold was generous and that going free was the right call for the population.

A small group objects to outfits being altered after purchase and to character physics being toned down, describing it as changing content they paid for.