BlayzBloo: Super Melee Action Battle Royale

Genre: Action

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Wireless)

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Review:

BlayzBloo is a multiplayer-focused, arena-based Action game first released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2010, and later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released. This game is a spin-off of the BlazBlue series, featuring chibi versions of characters from that series, though the gameplay here is extremely different, being closer to something like Power Stone.

This game features dated, simple looking 3D visuals, along with a rock-inspired soundtrack that… I can’t really hear over all the cartoony sound effects of characters hitting each other. Overall it’s fine, I guess, but there’s not anything here that’s impressive.

Unfortunately, as much as BlazBlue is complex and technical, BlayzBloo is chaotic and simple. Players only have a standard attack and a special attack, and the result is a lot of button-mashing. I suppose there could be some fun in that, but the game really limits things due to an extreme lack of content – there are only five characters, and three types of fights – you can fight for points, fight to see who survives longest, or you can fight to be the one holding a flag when a timer stops.

That last one is particularly terrible, by the way – it just encourages everyone to dogpile on the one with the flag, and there’s little point to even bother until the last few seconds of the round, because it doesn’t reward how long you held the flag, but simply whether you’re holding it at the end. However, all of the game modes have an issue with the fact that characters can be trapped in a corner and repeatedly wailed on, their only potential salvation coming if another character attacks your attacker while they’re distracted.

I applaud the folks behind BlayzBloo in trying to experiment and do something different with the BlazBlue franchise, but… well, this is an experiment that went wrong. Not only does it lack the beautiful presentation of the mainline games in the series, but the gameplay is a chaotic mess with poor design and a terrible lack of content and options. Even diehard fans of BlazBlue would probably be better off avoiding this one.

tl;dr – BlayzBloo is a multiplayer-focused, arena-based Action game that’s a spin-off of BlazBlue, but is as dumb and simple as the BlazBlue games are complex and technical. Sadly, this game’s chaotic gameplay is pretty poorly-designed, and also suffers from a terrible lack of content. While this is an interesting direction for a spinoff of this series to go, it’s not a good direction.

Grade: D

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