Known as BLASTDOZER over here in Japan, this is a game I'd gotten for three whole dollars CIB back in the States but had never gotten around to playing. I'd actually sold that copy before I moved here, but I found ANOTHER CIB copy over here for the same price XD. I've owned that copy for quite some time, and it's only this TR theme that's gotten me to play it. I was playing the Japanese version of the game, and I didn't bother with most of the mini-game missions, but I did complete all of the main ones and got the credits at the end in around 7 or 8 hours.
Blast Corps doesn't have a ton of story to speak of, and is really more of a conceit for gameplay rather than a fully fledged story. You're a new employee in the titular company, and your job is to use your series of destruction vehicles to destroy buildings in the path of an out of control carrier for nuclear missiles so it doesn't touch them and explode! You've also got hidden beacons to find for extra levels, and hidden scientists to find for the true final mission (and the credits), but that's really it. It's very much a sandbox-style game, and it doesn't really have any pretentions of giving you any more exposition than you absolutely need to accomplish the task at hand. The gameplay of Blast Corps takes place between the main missions and the unlockable side missions. The main missions are you clearing the way for the previously mentioned nuclear danger truck. If that touches ANYTHING, it's game over and you gotta restart the stage (which is thankfully quick and easy). Your vehicle types range from the easy to use big tumbling robot that tumbles into things to break them, to the somewhat more complicated jet-booster car or bulldozer that just plow into stuff to break them, to the highly technical dump truck that destroys stuff by drift-sliding into them. You start a level in a particular vehicle, but you can get out of your vehicle to swap to a new one nearby if you need to, and you often need to, especially in harder levels. Aside from the main levels, there are also mini-game levels where you often choose your vehicle at the start instead of getting it given to you like in the normal levels. These levels involve things like destroying a bunch of buildings in a strict time limit or even completing a race, and you get a bronze, silver, or gold (or even platinum, if you're hella hella good at it) for doing it well enough. The game's main levels have this as well, where you get a gold medal for finishing them at all, and then there's another gold medal to be gotten if you destroy every building, free all the survivors (which is just destroying every building but easier), and light up all the lights on the ground by going near them (rewarding you for exploring, I guess). Those side missions in the main levels aren't super interesting, but getting gold on every level does unlock more levels in the post-game, so there is a sort of incentive to do it (although I did not). Blast Corps is fundamentally a puzzle game at its core, as you need to not just find out how to destroy the buildings in time, but also actually DO it. This makes it very much like another British-created puzzle game: Lemmings. Blast Corps, as a result, also shares a lot of the problems Lemmings has. It even has what I call the Lemmings Problem: You know what to do for how to solve it, but now you gotta DO it. Blast Corps suffers more from this than anything else, and how much that impacts your enjoyment of it will really determine how much of a winner this game is for you (AJ loves this game a lot, and I'm a lot more mixed on it). The large degree of technicality that something like the dump truck uses compared to the bulldozer or robots make for a really uneven difficulty curve as well, and combined with somewhat awkward camera controls (you've gotta take your hand off the accelerator to turn the camera, and in the later levels which have SUPER strict time limits, that can be a death sentence) that can sometimes make walls look invisible, you've got a game that is pretty easy fun on the lower end of its difficulty, but a game I find very hard to recommend anyone stick with to see the credits in. The presentation is fine, but nothing about it stands out a ton. It was a game made by a very new, quite small team in just about a year, and so it's a game that largely just "works" as well as it does and that's all it really needed to do. It's not an ugly game, and stuff like the big one-armed tumble robot are very iconic (one-armed because the designer ran out of memory to make the other arm, and then just liked how it looked so he kept it X3). It's also nearly identical to its English counterparts, with the only changes being some slightly more lenient platinum medal times and the graphics updated to reflect the different title. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. It's kinda a shame they never expanded upon this concept, as with a bit more spit and polish, a Blast Corps 2 could've been something really special. As it is, this is a game that is really hard to recommend unless you can get it for cheap. It could be something you really love, but it could be something you're pushing through to beat out of spite like I did. It's generally pretty cheap, so if you like N64 games and the concept of a time/score attack building destroying game sounds cool, then this is probably worth picking up, but if any of this has sounded not up your alley, I don't think you're missing out on a ton by passing this one by.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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