Day 280 - Blaster Power
Shooter, Contains Doom, Immersive Sim ·
Skeeter’s Take:
From the dev that brought you Blaster Meltdown comes Blaster Power! Same cool green goo slip-n-slides, same “ammo costs energy” resource concept, a whole lot more fun!
Blaster Meltdown feels like the prototype for what would become Blaster Power. There’s been a rebalancing of the shooting system. Instead of losing energy every time you shoot, the gun now has a clip, and upon reloading the energy is drained. Blaster Meltdown used the “Overheat meter” which upon reaching 100% overheat, the player would lose the game. This meter would deplete with time. With Blaster Power, the energy comes in the form of a power bar that can be refilled with batteries. These batteries are placed at specific points of the level and act as a soft “checkpoint”. This makes managing resources a little different. Where you could wait for the overheat meter to cool down in Blaster Meltdown, here you are working with a finite resource. I like this approach as it feels more tactile and less “let me stand here and wait for my cooldown or go find a power-up”. The player also has been given a sword that can slash and hit multiple close enemies, or deflect bullets back at enemies. This felt very reminiscent of ULTRAKILL - another Doom-like “Boomer Shooter” that is quick paced and has a melee punch that deflects bullets back at the enemy.
In fact, I think the reason I enjoyed this so much was because of how much it reminded me of ULTRAKILL. I don’t really want to go into it now, but that game rules and if this genre of game is up your alley, ULTRAKILL is one of my favorites, hands down.
YOU FLICK A COIN AND SHOOT IT AND THE COIN HITS AN ENEMY IN IT’S CRIT SPOT AND IT’S FUCKING BADASS, BEST WEAPON IN A GAME. YOU HEAL WITH YOUR ENEMIES BLOOD. THE GAME IS A BILLY GOAT.
I digress.
Blaster Power also adds an upgrade system.
This not only gave me a good incentive to seek out every powercell in a level, it also adds a layer of replayability and player agency that Blaster Meltdown didn’t have. Look at all those choices! This game is serving “BK-have-it-your-way” upgrades and I’m down for it.
The one thing I feel is missing is the timer. While Blaster Meltdown focused solely on the time trial aspect of the game (it even had a leaderboard!), Blaster Power takes a different approach and just gives you arbitrary points:
How are those points calculated? Do the power cells affect the final point score? Is it based on number of times I was hit in a run, or how fast it was completed, or how many enemies I killed?
Answer: 720
I appreciate that there were multiple levels with different design ideas - my favorite being the single giant room full of enemies that you have to funnel into the starting choke point to kill:
I get that there is a different design philosophy here than Blaster Meltdown, even if only slightly. However, this game screams “GO FAST”. The “speed goo” racing tracks, the base move speed upgrade, the cool jump pads that launch you high into the air - it is all begging for a time trial.
And yet, there is no timer. It just feels strange when you are speeding through a level and you’re timing your shots perfectly to kill a monster in a three bullet combo while not slowing down. If you pull that off, it feels good. It feels fun. You reach the end and wonder “Neat, I wonder how fast I completed this level!” only to be met with:
It just seems like a bit of an oversight to not include that timer as a bonus for the speed freaks - clearly the dev knows racing against your own time can be fun - they made Blaster Meltdown for hell’s sake! It seems like such a commonplace statistic in these games it almost feels wrong that it’s not there. Hell, the game that started it all:
And even the modern classics
That’s really my largest complaint. With a timer, this game goes from Power to Blaster. That being said, I still somehow managed a sub 100 second time:
Recommend: Yeah
Replay Percentage Chance: 0%
Time Played: 12 minutes
Sam’s Take:
While everything Skeeter says is true, I do have to say the lack of timer does take away from speedrunning it. I know that’s not how the game should be judged, but honestly I only learned to love Blaster Meltdown through speedrunning it, now you just run through enemies asap:
If we can find out what the perfect score is (I assume that’s just getting all upgrades and killing all enemies), then maybe we can make a “max points” speedrun category.
What do I mean “we”?
I mean me.
I can do that.
Recommend: Uhh… sure
Replay Percentage Chance: 50%
Time Played: 17 Minutes
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