I have some issues with the precision of the gun’s aiming, which feels often like it offers less help than needed in auto-aim, but the progression of your powers with the strength of the enemies feels somewhat natural, and often I felt like the upgrades I was getting were making me noticeably and satisfyingly stronger.īut the combat itself suffers from a long list of smaller balancing and pacing issues that make Blackwind increasingly frustrating.
At a baseline level, the combat is functional enough. At a point, you also unlock a “Dark Mode” of the Battle Frame that gives you a limited-time damage and speed upgrade. The Battle Frame has a typical suite of melee attacks, longer-range shooting, and special abilities, and there is a surprisingly diverse list of skills and abilities to unlock in the Battle Frame’s skill tree. You control Jimmy in the Battle Frame as he fights primarily through hordes of Raknos, from the grunts to the most powerful elites. Taking from top-down shooters of the past, Blackwind is a fixed-camera action game. On the gameplay front, Blackwind has a few notable ideas.
It doesn’t help that the writing implies the game doesn’t take itself seriously in the slightest, with Jimmy and his mech speaking in quips and eye-rolling one-liners like “I feel like I’m playing a video game right now.” There are certainly some laugh-inducing lines, especially ones coming from the AI, but it isn’t enjoyable enough, nor does it have enough unique in-game one-liners, to keep it from getting old fast. It tries to do far too much with far too little in its story and ends up dropping the ball entirely. In doing so, it also draws out its runtime with an extra hour or so of what feels like padding at the end that culminates in an undeserved and unsatisfying conclusion.
#Blackwind ow full
It fails to have any discussion of the moral complexity of some of the things it tells you to do and seems to assume your full agreement. Without wishing to spoil, there are themes that Blackwind attempts to explore in the later stages of the game that neither it nor its teenaged protagonist have a solid grasp on tackling. The story takes a turn for the worse in the later stages in both pacing and content. It has a hint of a clear vision, but on so many levels it fails to provide balance, a unique selling point, and most importantly, fun." " Blackwind is just a frustrating experience from front to back. For the first half of the 5-6 hour story, the plot progresses in a meaningful and understandable way that, though entirely predictable and thoroughly unoriginal, provides a logical background for the gameplay and a loose enough semi-linear structure as we watch Jimmy fight through hordes of Raknos and uncover more secrets about their origins and their past interactions with the humans already on the planet. The basis of the story is simple and engaging enough, and Jimmy is enough of a blank slate that he can be relatable to most people and has a lot of room for growth. Suddenly, the spaceship is shot down over a planet called Medusa-42, and Jimmy is stuck in the mech and tasked with figuring out why the spaceship got shot down, finding his father, and navigating the hostile terrains of Medusa-42 that is teeming with an alien species known as the Raknos. The opening moments of Blackwind put you in a spaceship with Jimmy Hawkins, an innocent and curious teenager, and his father, an inventor and technology guru who shows Jimmy that he has created a mech-like Battle Frame with an embedded AI. It has a hint of a clear vision, but on so many levels it fails to provide balance, a unique selling point, and most importantly, fun.
No, Blackwind is just a frustrating experience from front to back. It’s not an endearingly bad game either, one where its flaws come down to foundational design principles or a lack of a cohesive vision. It gives the impression that it was created with a single idea in mind, but when it came to pulling together everything that creates a full experience, there are so many things that permeate almost every characteristic that feel underdeveloped, unfinished, or downright broken. In a lot of ways, Blackwind feels like a first draft.
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