It’s been all play for me so far today. The second game I tried out was US import title Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy - a shoot-em-up from tiny developer Budcat.

It’s an old-school side-scroller with a very distinctive graphical style, that some will immediately write off as cheap and nasty, but it’s got a great deal of charm (and allows for a lot of onscreen action, which gets very hectic very quickly). The hook is that every time you destroy an enemy, you can catch the falling debris and add it to your ship. This means you can grow at an exponential rate, eventually taking up most of the screen if you’re clever. Of course if you’re hit, then whichever piece came into contact with the bullet will fall off, but you can press and hold the Z button to revert back to your original size - for when you need to dodge between many onscreen bullets. Though this puts you in more danger - if you can get debris surrounding your tiny craft, you’re not only well protected, but your firepower increases depending on what you’ve added - various other ships add different firing capabilities, with which you can take out almost any small enemy that comes into your path.

There’s also a detailed editor which allows you to create your own levels, though you do need 107 blocks of free memory to do that, so I need to delete some old VC/WiiWare games before I do that. But for now, Blast Works looks very intriguing indeed - it’s an interesting idea, well executed, and looks to have plenty of value. Especially as the Easy difficulty isn’t quite as simple as the name might suggest.

Bookmark It

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 5:03 pm by Chris Schilling
Early impressions, Latest Games.