As TransFed Marshal John “Ditch” Crane, you’ve been assigned to suppress a clone uprising on the battle platform, Honour Guard…
- NA release: 26th November 2003
- EU release: N/A
- JP release: N/A
- Developer: Terminal Reality
- Publisher: Majesco Entertainment
- NGC Magazine Score: N/A
- Mods Used: Widescreen Hack
Upon starting BlowOut, there seemed to be a lot of potential. It’s a shooter in a 2D plane with a focus on exploration and a map screen that is straight out of Metroid, along with hidden areas behind walls you can blow up. Unfortunately, it soon becomes evident that while this looks like a Metroidvania – 2D ones on home consoles were rare at this point in time – it lacks every single element that makes the genre special.
Moving around seems fine at first. You can aim in any direction with the right stick and move with the left, and you have a jetpack which makes you hover at a certain height. This seems neat at first, but there seems to be no time limit to this, you can just hover as long as you need. This means that the platforming has zero challenge to it. A lot of moving about happens on lifts (with an annoying voice that announces what floor you’re on every single time, even though it’s never important) and it makes the general movement just very boring.
At first I thought “well, you hover at a certain level, that will be something to upgrade to reach new areas”, but I was wrong about that. In fact, there are no upgrades and abilities you unlock that help you reach new areas, it’s all entirely key or button based. This means that the exploration is just picking a route when you come to a junction and moving forward until you reach a dead end with nothing, a dead end with a key or a blocked path. At this point, you need to backtrack and try the other routes. Without the fun of “oh, I can now get past that obstacle” after earning a new ability, this just makes the entire process tedious.
The game takes place on ten separate levels of maps like this, and the game never mixes anything up, everything you do in the first level is the same as what you’re doing in the final level, in levels that all look the same. There is a high score system which is probably meant to encourage you to learn and memorise the best route, but as respawning enemies get you points, you can cheese the high score anyway. This is a game that clearly got inspiration from Metroid and wanted to merge it with Contra, but focused on the wrong elements of each one to merge together.
Poor
There is something to be said for what BlowOut tries to do, but that statement doesn’t make up for the fact that the game just isn’t interesting for very long. Originally, the game was set to include a level editor, which may have provided some lasting value, but that appears to have been omitted in the final product. BlowOut may seem enticing to any of you classic shooter fans looking for a quick trip down memory lane, but to be perfectly frank, BlowOut probably won’t instill any feelings of pleasant nostalgia and will sooner frustrate or bore you to the point of noninterest.
Alex Navarro, GameSpot
Remake or remaster?
Nothing special needed for this.
Official Ways to get the game
BlowOut is available on Steam, however it seems to be a re-release of the old PC version which has poor mouse controls and struggles to recognise controllers, and may have issues on newer operating systems
Europe
Japan
North America
GameCube Games by Date
2002: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2003: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2004: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2005: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2006: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
