Kero Blaster: Short and Sweet
Kero Blaster comes from the mind of the creator of Cave Story: Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya. The original build of the game, titled Gero Blaster, was based on Amaya’s comics which he drew in college where he was a frog and his girlfriend was a cat. His girlfriend was kidnapped by aliens and the frog had to run and gun his way to her rescue. It was originally going to be for iOS (which Nicalis thinking of bringing it to 3DS). Amaya decided to scrap the entire game and thus Kero Blaster (with some remnants from Gero Blaster) was born.
The worst thing about Kero Blaster is that it probably has the shadow of Cave Story hanging over its head. Cave Story is ten-years-old at this point, and it assisted in bringing some indie games to the forefront, or at least ameliorating indie development in some people’s eyes. Pixel developed the game in five years, and he released it for free. Later versions would be on consoles and would be enhanced ports sold for profit. Some people going into Kero Blaster might be going in for a Cave Story 2 as opposed to a game on its own. Admittedly, Kero Blaster is shorter and might not have as much structural ambition as Cave Story, but it’s a solid product on its own with plenty of replay value in its own right.
Kero Blaster follows a frog who is an employee of Cat & Frog Company, where his profession is in “custodial sciences” and it’s his job to go out and clean up teleporters that have gone offline. His boss is this angry purple cat wearing fashionable sunglasses, angrily spouting squiggly lines at the player. It is in the first few scenes that the player realizes that while the character and environment designs might look simplistic, there is utter depth in that simplicity. Many environments seem to feature a fair attention to detail, with more detail than the original 2004 version of Cave Story. Little things like furniture, references to other games, greenery, etc. are strewn throughout the game. While the character design may look simple, within the first scene of the game, the player will realize that there’s an astounding amount of good character animation. This makes some of the characters more expressive and having more personality than expected. It may be fairly minimalist, but it carries many of the scenes without superfluous dialogue. It fits with the game’s environmental design and whatever dialogue there is.
The start screen is a fairly brilliant introduction to the game. I know comparisons have been drawn to Mega Man X in that it shows you the potential of the game in terms of what the player can do. Unlike MMX's title screen, you're actively doing everything to see what you can do with the blaster. Sure it aptly demonstrates the actual title of the game, but at the same time, it's effective in the player learning how to control the game (and also test out controls if you've remapped them).
Regarding the controls, the control, handling, and physics are pretty solid, with the jump momentum not feeling like it's inadequate or completely broken. Having played the game with both a controller and a keyboard, both control schemes work incredibly well. Part of this reason is because the controls are fairly simple: you have directions, jump, fire, and weapon switch. Holding down fire lets you fire continuously in the direction that you started firing shots. It’s pretty straightforward and doesn’t necessarily tax the player as much as expected. Jumping is varied as you’d expect: tapping on jump results in a smaller jump, holding longer results in a longer jump, and momentum-built jumps allow you to cross larger distances. The water physics feel good and predictably slower. The double-jump feels pretty decent, too. Unlike the game's demo "Pink Hour", I found that the platforming was easier. I don’t necessarily feel like I’m trying to jump with pixel-perfect jumps, so it’s far less taxing on the player than expected.
Most of the combat in the game relies on not necessarily trying to match your enemies' attacks or their heights, but it's normal run and gun standards of using the right weapon and dodging as fast as you can. New enemies are introduced at a decent pace and it's not too hard to learn how to dodge and strike. The four main weapons work fairly differently and they have different ranges and work very well in different situations. Much like in Mega Man, you'll find yourself using weapons at different times to get through stages more efficiently. I found that the weapons were well-balanced. You begin with a short-range peashooter and you can upgrade it to make it stronger with coins you find as you defeat enemies and venture through levels. You end up acquiring even more weapons with different capabilities like a beam wave (evolving into a neat spread cannon), a bubble gun, etc. Each weapon is useful to clear paths in different ways.
I never felt like the game was wasting my time and I appreciated that it trimmed fat that could have been there (ex: levels being too long, more upgrades than required, etc). It was fairly easy to get the upgrades if you needed them. The game doesn't even waste your time with respect to checkpointing, either. If you die in an area, the game checkpoints at every screen so you don't waste your time doing the entire area all over again unless you game over. And even if you game over, you get to keep your weapons and upgrades. You can save and pick up at the most recent checkpoint without starting over again. In essence, it’s more likely the case that it blended the lives-based game structure with modern checkpointing very well.
The music is very good. It's a shame that the soundtrack that came with the game's soundtrack bundle isn't that great in terms of audio quality, but the soundtrack in-game is very catchy. The samples used for each theme sounds great and the melodies are composed well-enough to linger in your memory, right down to the final boss theme. I'm very pleased with the Building, Stage 5, Stage 1, and Store themes, simply because while they're simple in terms of melody, the samples used are pretty clean and the bass/percussion stand out.
I think Pixel did a good job with Kero Blaster, and I'm glad he's experimenting with a genre that isn't Cave Story. While some may avoid this game for not being another Cave Story, I think they'd be missing out on a game that doesn't overstay its welcome and has some of the most solid platformer controls of the year.