They'll find plenty of weapons along their journey, including one-handed and two-handed swords as well as axes, maces, polearms, spears, and bows. Some of the weapons are even magical or poisonous. You'll also come across a variety of shields, which can be used together with a one-handed weapon to repel attacks. Shields are valuable, but when their durability is reduced to nothing and they break, they'll leave you vulnerable for a moment. Fortunately, two-handed weapons can be used, to an extent, in place of shields to parry oncoming attacks right at the last moment.

Being able to parry attacks is just one of the many fighting techniques available in Blade of Darkness. The combat system lets you input different key combinations to produce a wide variety of different attacks, but you must be mindful of your stamina, or you'll find yourself out of breath and a sitting duck. You gain experience as you kill enemies, and as you gain experience levels, you gain access to additional special attacks, and you get stronger and healthier. This system is more robust than that of most similar games, although it isn't quite as open as Die by the Sword's system, which lets you swing your sword arm in any direction by moving your mouse around accordingly. However, as in Die by the Sword, the combat in Blade of Darkness can take a lot of getting used to. The controls aren't immediately intuitive and don't seem very responsive, and it'll actually take you a while to get a grasp of the timing necessary to win battles. You'll often get frustrated with how your character will tend to step too far into every attack, inadvertently moving past the intended foe and exposing his or her back. You'll also find that it can be difficult to tell when your character is taking damage; there often isn't a clear visual or audible cue when you suffer a hit. Furthermore, each character's walking speed is inordinately slow. You have to double-tap the walk key in order to run, which is faster, but even the running speed can seem sluggish, at least for the larger characters. If you're more used to fast-paced first-person shooters, you'll find that it takes a while to get accustomed to the rather deliberate pacing in Blade of Darkness.

Then again, once you get into combat, the pacing definitely picks up. The battles in the game are challenging, because your opponents are fast, tough, aggressive, and even somewhat intelligent. Unfortunately many of these foes can be trapped into simple patterns, though you'll actually find that exploiting these patterns is often imperative to your success. However, doing so requires you to be fighting in wide-open spaces, which isn't always possible. When you're in tight quarters, the game's third-person camera angle has a tendency of panning in too close to your character suddenly, thus throwing off your timing. Fortunately, for the most part, the camera does a good job of showing you what's ahead; you just have to make sure and let nothing get behind you.