Reviewed: May 3, 2005
Reviewed by: Daniel Sayre
Publisher
Intermediaware
Developer
Intermediaware
Released: April 14, 2005
Genre: Shooter
Players: 2
ESRB: N/A
5
7
6
5
5.7
System Requirements
Recommended System
Demo Version Download
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Absolute Blue comes from relative obscurity in an effort to set the shooting world on fire. A strictly by-the-book side-scrolling shooter; you guide your ship through stage after stage fighting aliens and trying to save Earth.
Absolute Blue was developed by the talented team of Jochen Heizmann and Emmanuel Henné. As far as shooter’s go, this one is what I’d term “standard.” You have a ship, a lone hero, overwhelming odds, and weapons. That’s the recipe for a standard shooter, to become exceptional; it must rise above those limitations and therein lays the goal of development.
Your ship has the standard movements, forward, reverse, up, down, the usual. Your ship is armed with blasters and you can increase these five levels by collecting power-ups. There are three special power-ups that increase your offensive arsenal even further. These are found scattered across the course of the game and you continue with them from stage to stage.
These special weapons consist of satellites that are placed above and below your ship. When you hold the fire button a stream of bullets will emerge in a spray pattern. The third special power-up is a forward laser. When you hold down the fire button, the laser charges up and fires in an area directly in front of your ship. That’s it. Those three weapons are the only ones beside your standard blasters.
The enemy can launch numerous enemy ships, but most fall after a few shots, and they blow up quite nicely too. Inexplicably, some enemies can be destroyed at certain points while other identical ones later on cannot. This makes things very confusing and has led to many a death on my part. Bosses are huge and often fill the screen (or a great majority of it.) Another persistent foe is the level geometry itself.
You’ll often find yourself hurtling through twisting caverns having to guide your ship through to safety. This is easily the most creative aspect of the game and I enjoyed those portions the most.
Sadly, the checkpoint system is less then ideal. You can only save between “major” missions. Since stages themselves take anywhere between ten and fifteen minutes to get through, failing involves a lot of replay. Once you start a mission, you can’t exit to the menu without losing all progress made in that stage.
The story is practically a walking cliché and the dialog isn’t quite perfect. It’s not “off-off” but enough that you know English wasn’t the first language. It’s not bad enough to muddle the story, such as it is. The game is bought online (through a downloadable installation program) and installation is a breeze. When the game is started up, the loading is excessive, but once inside loading is no longer a real concern.
The backgrounds are mostly static, but some sections do have moving parts. Some of the stages are broken into slightly different areas and not being able to distinguish true backgrounds (which can’t harm you) from foregrounds (which can) is sometimes problematic.
Most of the stages, within themselves, are the same. When you change larger areas, the stages themselves become quite diverse and are easily one of the better parts of Absolute Blue.
Your ship looks to be a static sprite, not too bad; it fulfills its function adequately. Your weapon effects are low-key and get to be very boring, very fast as they’re are less then ten of them total. The power-up weapons are much more interesting visually, but even they get boring after awhile.
The enemy ships are repeated often, but are pretty creative. The explosions are easily the best part of the game as they have sufficient flash and “oomph.” Oddly enough, slowdown would occasionally rear its ugly head with pauses as long as ten seconds at certain areas (most often near a stage boss) For a game like this it’s really inexcusable and shows a lack of polish on part of the developers. It doesn’t really interfere with the gameplay, but it shouldn’t happen in the first place.
The menu has a nice musical ditty, but once you start the stages you start a long drawn out symphony of repetitiveness. The musical accompaniment changes for the different stages, but the explosions, enemy noise, and your own weapons stay the same through the entire game. It’s just another section that contributes to the boring malaise every time I started to play.
There is voice acting but it’s the same phrases every time the characters speak. The roles also sound like they were done by androids with an absence of emotion when speaking “the” line.
The musical background themselves are quite nice and pleasing to listen to, but the battle sound often drown them out. I found myself turning effects almost all the way down just to get to the music itself. The sounds of battle being detrimental is never a good sign.
The game does offer a wide variety of stages, but there is no incentive to play again other then to get a higher score. There is no multiplayer of any sort, which probably could’ve spiced up the experience somewhat, but with the slowdown, it’s probably best they didn’t.
Absolute Blue is only twenty dollars so that does help offset some of the problems, but not nearly enough. Having played other so-called “budget-ware” I know how high a bar can be achieved. Absolute Blue isn’t anywhere near that.
After playing Absolute Blue, I’m left entirely unsatisfied. Be it the uninspired gameplay, the anemic weapon selection or the drawn out length of the game. Some SNES games have a wider range and variety of weapons then are found in Absolute Blue. The sound effects were better to.
The game works and runs pretty decent, even with the occasional bit of slowdown, but there’s just nothing here I really enjoyed. It was a chore to play and never drew me into the experience. Any game that forces that on me isn’t one I would recommend to others. Especially since I know other $20 shooters do a much better job.