Blastful

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

Blastful is a 2-Stick Shooter with Shmup elements released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2021. This is a game that has players fighting enemies in auto-scrolling stages like a Shmup, but with 2-Stick Shooter mechanics.

There. I just told you the most interesting part of this game.

The presentation here is odd, featuring 3D backgrounds, and the spaceships that are fighting in the foreground are presented either using poorly-detailed and badly cel-shaded visuals or, more likely, poorly-rendered 2D images with thick outlines. Either way, it’s ugly and difficult to make out the details of the tiny ships that form most of this game’s enemies. This is backed by a synthesized soundtrack that’s forgettable to the point where I wonder if it’s a public domain asset.

Things don’t get any better when you look at the gameplay, either. The gameplay here is slow-paced, uninspired, repetitive, and features a lot of frustrating issues that make it difficult to enjoy even on a basic level.

The 2-Stick Shooter mechanics automatically snap your ship in one of eight directions rather than allowing smooth aiming. Players can turn this off in options menu, but this results in jerky aiming that doesn’t match the direction you’re pushing. Players can hold down any button to auto-fire, but this results in a firing rate so absurdly slow that it’s basically pointless. You can instead opt to repeatedly tap a button to fire, but with the 2-Stick Shooter mechanic the only buttons it makes sense to do this with are L2 and R2, and this gets tiring very quickly. You’ll still want to fire as fast as possible though, not because enemy ships are so tough, but because all of their slow-moving gunfire can be intercepted by your own, which ends up meaning that you’re trying to push through layers of gunfire just to land a hit on an enemy.

There are tons of great 2-Stick Shooters on the Nintendo Switch, and Blastful not only does nothing to distinguish itself against that crowd, but it has quite a lot of issues that make it more tedious and frustrating to play. Even at the low $4 price tag this game is asking for, there’s simply no reason to bother with this game.

tl;dr – Blastful is a 2-Stick Shooter with some Shmup mechanics, but it’s a completely uninspired entry in the genre that does nothing noteworthy and quite a few things to make playing it a tedious, frustrating slog. This game is not worth your time or money.

Grade: D-

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