Games in 2019, Part 10: FullBlast
(Picture from switchplayer.net)
I was going to do a joke, 1-liner post for this, but I think that’s not very fair on the game; I don’t like to poo-poo games (unless they poo-poo’d me first), so I’ll just explain why I wouldn’t recommend people play this game.
This game feels like “my first shmup in a game maker program”. I don’t mean offense to the creator, but the game *actually* comes off this way. It feels like a person trying to make a shmup for the first time because of stuff like powerups coming so infrequently or the game having lots of enemy types, but having 90% of enemies act exactly the same way (they shoot a bullet at you. That’s it)
It gives me the impression that the mindset was “okay, we’re making a shmup; what do shmups have? Okay, they have these things, let’s add them in!” which is fine, but it also doesn’t seem like they considered why these things are in these types of games. They aren’t in these games because “shmups have them” and when they are added, these aspects still need to be individually balanced and considered.
Other problems are padding and difficulty. The game boasts several levels but in all honesty, with the way it’ll reuse a background for several stages at a time, it really feels like the game was padded out (I certainly felt the game could have been more condensed to be tighter). Difficulty is another issue. 90% of the game is 1/10 difficulty; if you know about “streaming” in shmups and how aimed shots work, you’ll breeze through the game (and by breeze, I mean you’ll slowly plod through a five minute long level without difficulty). The other 10% of the game is stupid hard. It wasn’t a very balanced experience.
...I think that’s all I have to say. I wouldn’t recommend this game at all. Like I said, it feels like student project game that was excessively padded out and sold on a digital storefront. The only, only reason you might have to get this game is for the very, very, VERY easy platinum trophy you get from playing the first five minutes. (No this is not a joke; the publisher of this game on PS4, “Ratalaika”, seems to make all trophies from all the games they publish be easy platinums that can be cleared in about give minutes. I know this because another, much better game from the same publisher, Metagal, worked exactly the same way.