Blacksea Odyssey

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Blacksea Odyssey is a 2-Stick Shooter with Roguelike elements that seems like it was deigned by someone who heard the “Whalers on the Moon” song from Futurama and thought, “yeah, that’d be a good idea for a videogame”. As such, you play as a hunter of great space-beasts in a beast-hunting competition.

Gameplay in Blacksea Odyssey primarily consists of tracking down space critters and using two-stick shooter mechanics to take them out. You’ll have two primary weapons at your disposal, a spear, which is frustratingly low in power and slow to toss, and a harpoon, which is even slower, and keeps you from using the spear while charging it. You can use the harpoon to rip off body parts of the aliens, but this doesn’t really seem to hobble their abilities much – it just takes off some health.

Even more frustrating than the combat is how slow your character is – even using one of your limited rechargeable boosts, you often still can’t outrun many of the creatures you encounter. With this being the case, I frequently found myself going in circles to avoid an enemy suddenly speeding up, trying to aim the harpoon, missing, trying again, missing, trying again, hitting an armored spot and doing no damage… ugh…

This game has other abilities and power-ups, but it is stingy in handing these out. To even open one of the treasure chests randomly distributed in the levels you need to defeat a creature to get a key… and creatures don’t always have keys… and then the chest may very well contain only gold which… maybe there’s a shop or something you can use this is? I don’t know, I honestly never made it that far, because the game’s controls and combat are pretty terrible.

As the very least, I give the game credit for its fairly unique theme, though I’m not sure the game’s music quite matches that theme, being very repetitive and synthesized when something more metal-inspired would seem a better fit. The graphics at least work with the game’s theme, though they’re pretty simplistic and ugly.

I felt like Blacksea Odyssey had a lot of promise, but the core gameplay here is just not fun, and frustrating to the point where any depth to be found here just didn’t seem worth struggling to get to. I don’t recommend this one.

tl;dr – Blacksea Odyssey is a Two-Stick Shooter with Roguelike elements that is basically Captain Ahab In Space. That sounds really cool, but the terribly slow combat and sluggish movement make it hard to get into, and players will likely find the game too tedious to want to play for very long.

Grade: C-

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