Blasto Review

It’s gotta be hard to come up with a mascot. You get your Mario and Sonic which were really the heads of their respective platforms. Crash Bandicoot maybe for the PS1. Who does the xbox have? Master Chief maybe? PS2? PS3? Crash is still around but when you think of “the guy” for the PlayStation after Crash, who or what is it?

Bubsy tried. I think Rayman tried. And Blasto tried. And I think we all know what happened with them.

Blasto really feels like it was trying to be the beginning of something great. It’s a 3d action platformer at a time when those were really all the rage. They came up with a bland story, filled it full of some slightly risque humor, made the hero a comic book character, and even got Phil Hartman to read the dialog for the guy.

It was mediocre enough to probably be, not a hit, but a standard.

However…

Blasto is here to recapture some evil alien dude that’s been out breaking all kinda of space laws. Blasto puts on his pants, grabs his blaster, and goes off to probe Uranus. Yes, it’s a bad joke. But it’s one that the game makes several times.

Blasto has to explore a variety of different worlds and rescue plenty of fan girls that would fit right in with a Duke Nukem game.

Jump the jump, shoot the alien bad guys, save the damsels in distress, fight the boss. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Eventually you’ll get to face the big bad guy, kick him in the trash, save the day. Yup. Great story there.

Gameplay is kind of where the game falls off the rails, as it often is with these games. Blasto really lives in the realm of Jersey Devil, Medievil, and their ilk and not so much the Spryo and Mario type.

Platforming is sketchy at best, combat is a mess, level design is either basic or extreme. There’s not a lot of in between when it comes to difficulty. Some levels are hub worlds and they’re a pain in the ass to navigate, the levels that aren’t part of the hubs are overly long and confusing.

You have to find switches, activate levels, shoot bad guys, save the ladies… all that. And Blasto doesn’t really move well. He’s a big beefy muscle guy with itty bitty legs and moving isn’t his strong point.

This is one in a long list of games that was sent to me (Thanks, Scarlet) that really just feels more like you’re fighting with the game to get things to happen that you shouldn’t.

Mario 64, as an example, is a bit of a challenge but for the most part it doesn’t feel like the game wants to keep you from succeeding. Blasto doesn’t want you to win.

The graphics are pretty standard for the era. Cartoony but with that little bit of PG-13 to make it just edgy enough to get the young kids to enjoy it. But, you could also go play Conker. That’s a better time. And I don’t even like Conker.

Enemy designs are also classic comic book/cartoon. Greys but not like you see in Perfect Dark, more like the Kill All Humans kind.

Nothing looks bad, but nothing really stands out. It really feels like they just wanted to copy/paste the ideas from other games, tweek em just a bit to get out of any legal troubles, and then slap the game out into the universe.

The music is also sufficiently mediocre. Thinking back about the game I couldn’t tell you anything about the music. It doesn’t stand out in any way. It’s really is just, and I hate to keep coming back to this, basic. Imagine for a moment what music you’d write for a semi-comedy sci-fi action space shooter.

Bingo. You got it. I don’t even know what you got, but you got it.

Not every game needs to break barriers. It’s totally fine to have a game that stays in it’s lane. There are hundreds of them out there, and I like a good deal of them. Hell 90% of the Mega Man games are exactly that.

But the issue here is, for me anyway, that it feels like developers were really putting all of their hopes and dreams on Phil Hartman’s reading of the lines. Which, by the way, is fine. Phil is in his classic Simpsons/SNL form here. He was making movies and TV. And they pulled him into this for which he read a few story segments and maybe a dozen lines of in stage dialog for when you get hurt, clear out some alien scum, or rescue a buxom blonde. And I know there’s only about a dozen lines because I heard them all multiple times in the playthrough.

If I were to sum up the experience I had with Blasto it would be this… They couldn’t quite get to the end zone. With anything. The plot is bog standard. The graphics, ditto. The music, forgettable. The voice acting, wasted. The game play, frustrating.

It’s really a perfect example of clocking out early and letting the night shift handle the rest. But there wasn’t a night shift on this one.