Blue Rider

Genre: Top-Down 2D Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

Blue Rider, released in 2016 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2018, is a game that I would describe as something between a 2-Stick Shooter and a Top-Down 2D Space Shooter. This game is played much like a 2-Stick Shooter, but reimagines the controls – Rather than one stick being movement and the other being aiming, your left stick moves your ship around and the right stick rotates your ship as well as the screen. While it sounds awkward, I found it to be fairly intuitive.

It’ s actually pretty enjoyable, weaving through enemy fire while blasting back, and grabbing upgrades to gradually get your ship more and more power or swap to a different weapon, and the gameplay here feels fairly unique.

Having said that, there are a few problems here. Your ship is heavily affected by inertia, and can feel sluggish to respond at times. This could have potentially made the game too difficult, but another issue sends the difficulty in the opposite direction – it is far too easy to cheese enemies and take advantage of their dumb AI. The easiest way is by out-ranging them – enemies often won’t react if you shoot them from far enough away, and many won’t fire until you let them get closer still, so simply keeping them at the edge of your screen and not proceeding until you’ve cleared them out makes for smooth sailing. And even when you can’t do this, circle-strafing can often work well, when enemies just cannot anticipate your movements to land a hit.

To the game’s credit, it looks quite nice, with colorful 3D visuals that look quite polished, backed by a catchy synthesized soundtrack that matches the action nicely. I’ll note that even with a lot of action on-screen, I didn’t detect any drops in the framerate.

Overall, I think Blue Rider is an enjoyable Top-Down Shooter Action game with unique controls that make for some fun gameplay, though it definitely has its issues too. However, overall I think it’s unique enough that it’s worth a look even despite those issues.

tl;dr – Blue Rider is something between a 2-Stick Shooter and a Top-Down 2D Space Shooter, and the unique controls make for some pretty fun gameplay, despite some frustrating physics and dumb enemy AI. Overall, I think the positives outweigh the negatives here, and if you’re looking for a somewhat original Action game, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in this one.

Grade: B-

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