With a few tweaks here and there it could have been a mindless, but playable, hack and slash mech game about a kid looking for their father while murdering aliens. Possible the worst sin that Blackwind commits is that it’s just so close to being good. As if that wasn't enough, there’s also plenty of times where my mech-suite become stuck in the geometry and I had to reload a checkpoint, which isn’t great news when you spend the game zipping into walls and railing all the time. Blackwind also has this nasty habit of putting more enemies in a location to make things more difficult, which is fine, but there are also no I-frames at all, so you can lose all of your health in less than 5 seconds, and wonder what the hell happened. You can be shot by enemies so far off-screen that you had no chance of knowing they were going to open fire. Getting lost in the woods does take some of the wind out of your sails a bit.ĭespite the toothless narrative and enemy design, the game itself is more ruthless than toothless. You could just kill them normally of course, but then you’d be missing out on a lot of health orbs, and you’re going to need them. Each enemy type has a single death animation that plays each time you kill them, and by the mid-way point, you’re going to get completely fed up of seeing it. On top of that, during combat, you often have to ‘execute’ enemies when they’re low on health. You do ramp up in platforming abilities as you go, but there were several times where making a jump required something so specific that I almost gave up out of sheer boredom. While having platforming challenges be integral is a nice touch, making them annoying to complete is quite another thing. Having said all that, it’s not like the gameplay itself doesn't offer a few hangups. The level design is similarly bland, with a combination of ‘underground military base/research station’ and then ‘grassland, desert, ice world, forest’ that feels like it’s been ripped straight out of 5 other video games. The enemies are aliens so generic that it’s almost impossible to remember what they’re called five seconds after you stop hearing the name. The story is really nothing special, and neither is the setting nor the enemies you face. If anything, the gameplay in Blackwind being as decent as it is becoming quite tragic when it’s let down by almost everything else. It's pretty nimble for a giant robot suit. It’s easy to compensate for this drawback, but it’s also something that requires you to get used to before you can really get into the swing of things. The only slight negative is that when you start a melee attack combo you get locked into the direction you were in when you started. You can dash from melee combos into firing rockets, chain in a ground pound, and finish the enemies off with your machine guns and it all feels pretty good. While it’s true that the gameplay isn’t overly original, it does at least provide a very good example of what the gameplay should look like. You have to complete platforming challenges to actually make it past certain points in the game.Īnother point in the game’s favor is that it actually controls relatively well. You can platform for one, and while platforming has been in other games of this style before, it’s actually a semi-important focus in this one. However, there are two elements that help it shine. You can move around and shoot with the left and right sticks, as well as access various powers and melee combos with your face buttons. The gameplay of Blackwind is relatively standard for an isometric hack-and-slash game. You have to admit, this is a pretty cool shot of the mech. Landing on an unfamiliar planet, surrounded by alien enemies, James and the suit’s AI must locate the boy’s father in hopes of being able to actually go to the bathroom again at some point in his life. As their ship is attacked, James becomes trapped inside an experimental suit and unable to leave. Rather than being a Robert Louis Stevenson character, Jim is a teenage boy who is journeying through space with his father, a scientist who makes mechs. Enter, Blackwind, a twin-sticks shooter/hack and slash game that is the answer to the question: “What if PS2-era mid-budget developers were still around and made a mech game for pre-teens?”īlackwind is a mech-combat hack and slash/twin-sticks-shooter hybrid that puts you into the robot-suit-clad shoes of James Hawkins. The problem is that outside of a few established franchises, giant robot fights can just end up feeling sort of…generic. Sure, you can have something with mechs that occasionally taps into mass-market appeal, like Power Rangers back in the 90s, but most of the time, if you’re into mechs, you have to be really into mechs. Mechs are something of an acquired taste.

Blackwind release date