Minimaps exist in the game, however, and it’s when people enter underground bases, which function effectively as RPG dungeons. And they drag on and on, with open-ended areas featuring no minimaps and distant checkpoints and fast travel points. The player frequently finds themselves hunting for objects to interact with, timed elevators to catch, jump between platforms, and so on, but the aforementioned unresponsive controls and an abundance of dodgy borders and invisible walls rapidly turn these parts into infernal chores. Whereas the first hour of the game implied fun exploration and platforming to come, this usually turns into tedious fetch quests, long backtracking, and most importantly, the controls and level designs are not good enough for the lengthy travels player need to prepare for. In between these high-speed battles, however, the game’s pacing can come to a crawl. While the controls aren’t always particularly responsive, which can become an annoyance when trying to pull off a specific combo, the high octane pace, the explosions, and the devastating Doom-Esque glory kill make for an exhilarating gameplay loop. To beat them, players can combine devastating melee and laser blade attacks, rockets, lasers, and all kinds of special moves, with many more that can be unlocked throughout the meaty campaign by picking up coloured energy spheres, spendable in save points that also function as upgrade areas. These, of course, mainly present themselves in the form of robot enemies, vaguely shaped like humanoids, bugs, animals, and more. He has no combat experience whatsoever, but the quest to find his dad and other possible survivors on a hostile planet will put him in a situation bigger than himself, making him learn to deal with dangers. A young teenager finds himself ordered by his dad to escape an out-of-control spaceship onboard a highly technological AI-controlled humanoid robot, something with a shape reminiscent of a Gundam or a Transformer. But let’s not rush to the conclusions – what is Blackwind, even?Īs mentioned in our preview last week, it tells a fairly simple story on the surface. We had a largely positive preview for Italian indie studio Drakkar Dev with Blackwind, an interesting mixture of dungeon crawler, hack ‘n’ slash, platformer, puzzle game, RPG, and many more, but something went sideways along the way. The early hours of a game are often the most crucial ones: it’s in these moments that a title can show its potential, hint at interesting story beats, start making us feel good as we start understanding the core mechanics.
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