Blackwind Review

There is a good game buried beneath here but I feel like the developers were a bit too over ambitious for their own good. For a random game I bought at a convention vendor which I knew nothing about, I did get more enjoyment out of it than I was initally thought but there was plenty of frustration to go along with it.

When I started up Blackwind, I actually really liked the mechanics of the game you got a dash, a special move, melee options as well as being able to shoot enemies and switch between melee and shooting seemlessly. It controls decent enoughly and I do like how the game has the God of War and new Doom games' scripted melee takedown to get health system. I always liked this since it encourages players to be aggresive and it doesn't want to make you want to cower or run away. The story is also unintrusive which is good for a game like this.

With all this said, there is plenty of things that actively hamper the experience. There isn't a whole lot of enemy variety or at least the tactics in which you dispatch them often consist of the same thing. Shoot melee enemies, use special ability, melee projectible enemies, damage them to do enough to do a scripted melee takedown, dashing constantly to create distance from enemies and on occasion, do the God of War style rage ability by clicking both analog sticks to defeat large enemies. You fight bugs and soldiers but a lot of the enemies types are analogs for one another like one melee, shooting, smaller enemies that shoot, bigger enemies and so on despite all this I did enjoy the game's combat to some degree mainly due to gratification I get from seeing the takedown animations and the enemies are somewhat varied to the point where you won't be doing one very specific tactic over and over, it's just that you will be doing 3-4 tactics over and over which is okay but nothing special. I also dislike how melee enemies can kill you very quickly and they don't react to when you shoot them which gets in the way of good feedback for your weapons but what prevented me from finding this too irritating is that checkpointed reasonably enough which helped me get through the game.

With the combat being okay, how else is the experience hampered? Well combat isn't the only thing you will be doing you will also be puzzle solving, platforming and backtracking and this is where I think the game faulters, the big issue with the level design is that it has this Halo CE and Castlevania Curse of Darkness problem of everything looking the same throughout. You even get a map in this game like you do in the latter which tells me the devs knew this so this is how they compensated for it. Puzzles can be rather obtuse for example, you will be piloting a drone a lot and one minute you can activate switches with a button press and then you need a passcode, and speaking of passcodes for the longest while I had a hard time telling which code opened which door and I had to guess a lot of the time. The platforming also isn't that great and actively get in the way of the mostly decent combat. It's too automated while at the same time jumps are floaty and aren't as precise as I want them. The time platforming sections are the worst since you need to activate switches you to get past that one annoying jump you were stuck on.

I feel like if the puzzles, backtracking and platforming were removed I'd enjoy the game more. If it was twin stick Serious Sam, I'd have more fun with it. Remove all the aspects I mentioned and spiced up the enemy variety and you could make a game that is easier for me to reccomend but overall, it feels like it could be enjoyable game but it's over ambiton gets in the way. The glitches also get had to make restart a few times. If you play this game be warned for many low points along the way. If you are unable to beat it and drop it at some point, I get it.