AN ILL WIND BLOWS
I was pretty interested in Blackwind when I heard about its upcoming release. On paper the game sounded like a blast, something right up my ally. In Blackwind players take control of young Jimmy Hawkins, who himself is in control of a mech like Battle Frame imbued with an AI; that was created by Jimmy’s father. In the outset of the game, their ship is shot down over planet Medusa-42 and Jimmy ends up trapped in the Battle Frame and has to figure out the ‘who and why” the ship was shot down but also find his father as well.
MSRP: $24.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, Switch, PC
Price I’d Pay: $14.99
Blackwind starts off well enough story wise in the early hours of gameplay, it’s the back half where the story starts to expand its reach on themes that frankly; the teenage hero that we’re introduced to doesn’t really comprehend. The outset is a pretty straight forward story, it’s something that gamers have seen before and it works as a setup but the twist just comes out of the blue. It’s a matter of the “reach exceeding the grasp”, while I applaud any developer that wants to take risks, and deliver more; it just didn’t work in this case to me.
The combat in Blackwind isn’t any better sadly, playing mostly like a top-down shooter the Battle Mech has a mix of melee, ranged and special abilities. There is an impressive number of abilities to unlock for the mech suit but I doubt anyone gets to use them. The combat in this game is a mess technically due to stunlocks, and other enemy attacks where its entirely possible to die just because the animation between getting stunned and recovering allows for multiple other attacks to connect. While the attacks the battle mech can deploy are satisfying and work well there isn’t anything overall special about any of them. The whole game just seems like it had a clear picture of what it wanted, but due to one reason or another they were forced to change things but keep others; and you end up with a mash up that doesn’t work all the time.
The bright and colorful world that is on display in Blackwind is one of it’s few saving graces, aside from the somewhat enjoyable combat the environments are eye catching at times. In a world of dark and dreary top-down shooters its nice when one bucks that trend and has beautiful snowy levels. Aside from combat there is some light puzzle solving in Blackwind, which does a decent enough job of breaking up the combat. But one of the big issues with the puzzles and the overall game is the lack of direction that is given to the player. Some times things will be explained and others, players will have to trial and error things to advance. Its frustrating more than anything else because I really wanted to like this game.
I struggled for days to get the game to run correctly on my Series X, and even then, once I could play I had to contend with glitching through the environments and fighting with the static camera which made seeing some enemies off screen impossible. Not to mention the aforementioned lack of any real goals or objectives that are posted for players to follow. There were times where I wondered around killing hordes of Raknos, just leveling up because I couldn’t figure out where to go next. Again, these are all odd design choices, and I really think there was budget cuts or something that stopped these developers from being able to properly finish this title. Sadly, as it is, I can’t really recommend this to anyone because whatever little good it may do, the bad outweighs it by quite a bit.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
