Blacksea Odyssey is an amazing concept for a game. You fly around space on a rocket surfboard, tethering beasts the size of planets, wielding spears and runes that allow for a host of amazing builds to facilitate a combination of tactical combat and twitch reflexes. Utterly unique from start to finish and bursting with original ideas like Willy Wonka playing Asteroids: Monster Hunter Edition while listening to Glory Hammer in the background.
There is just one problem: everything I just described is so shaky that it measures on the Richter scale. Don't get me wrong - it is a decent game and I'm going to give it a recommend for just how many unique ideas it has. But keep in mind that unique ideas are often unique for a reason. And just as a pogo-stick made of ice cream or an airplane made of banana bread sound both unique and awesome - they are not structurally sound.
Let's talk about what the game gets right: I enjoy combat. Very fun to fly around fighting a wide cast of imaginative enemies. Going up against some of the big bosses in particular and pulling chunks off of them until they look like they have suffered explosive bouts of leprosy. And I don't know why, but there is nothing like chasing down prey many hundreds of times your size and stabbing it to death with sewing needles that makes me feel like a legendary deep space hunter.
This game is 90% combat, 10% prep. But prep can completely alter how a fight goes. Maybe a particular set of runes are not doing the trick against the monster of the hour, but hey, swap in some water runes and the monster gets mashed. Which is important as a lot of the monsters you face are fairly beefy, with the kind of health bars that are used in gyms to rack weights for power lifters and small to medium sized forklifts.
The problem - by which I mean the problem around which all the game's problems revolve - is that the game is very clearly about luck, the runes you get dictate the kind of enemies you can handle, and yet the game is designed with the idea that skill is the deciding factor. I'm sorry, but there is no answer to certain enemies if you don't have the equipment to fight them. The most glaring example of this is when the game throws something like a berserk reefgoblin at you. How do you handle an enemy that is invulnerable to the front, can't be killed through raw damage, and can survive its body being ripped from its head - and STILL get faster? The answer is that you don't. Even if you boost, you run into the problem where your charged spear is slower than your character's movement - meaning that you've sunken time and resources into an enemy that just isn't worth the effort put into killing it. As the only way to kill it is to get a near impossible shot on a tiny fin going mach twelve and you'll suffer far more damage than any reward that creature can provide.
Even when an enemy is not impossible to kill, there are many cases where they are just tedious to deal with. Puffers, Angels, Starbait, Goblins, Sandchewers, and several other enemies are just not fun to fight and are usually not worth the trouble to kill. It gets even worse when most enemies in the later stages need to have their heads ripped off to have the common decency to stay down. And while fighting any one of these enemies is usually doable, every enemy comes in a group - often making dispatching them dangerous and tedious as you can't even position yourself to do damage without the right rune set up.
And that's really the killing blow. Later enemies just are not worth it. There is a strong argument to be made that if you're lucky enough to have your build sorted out you should skip killing enemies in the last couple rounds and just head straight for the boss of the zone, as engaging with the game at that point will always be a net loss. But even then, it goes back to the idea that even if you have your build sorted out, that doesn't mean you have the resources to beat the boss - as once again, some of the charging enemies are so fast that unless you are geared for boosting, you have no chance of outrunning them. It's to the point that playing against an elite charger boss is a flip of the coin. Sometimes they get mildly annoying enchantments like poison, or fire, or ice. But then you land on that 1 out of 4 chance that the boss whose entire gimmick is hitting fast and hard - you land on the berserk enchantment when makes the boss hit *faster and harder*.
I don't think I'm selling this correctly, so let me expand. There are multiple *normal* bosses that rely on use of your radar to have a chance against. You run along side them for a bit chucking sowing needles at them like an abusive spinster before they tear out of there like speed racer. But Berserk on elite bosses seems to increase their speed by some unknown percentage - and just as 50% faster on a tortoise just turns it into slightly faster tortoise, 50% faster on a formula 1 race car turns it into a interstellar warp missile powered by hate instead of blood. So by the time the monster shows up on your radar he is already helping himself to a space cowboy sandwich. I know at least one has an attacks that... well it isn't an instakill. It's more like an attack that does massive damage and can proc multiple times back to back that it is practically an instakill. It is the "I'm not touching you" of instakills.
But these are all extreme examples. If you play the game right, prioritize keys and drop rates over everything else, and keep runes based on their future utility against certain monsters, then you're going to make it. But here is the problem with that: most of the rewards suck. The best character in the game is Emerald Jones - he is unlocked by killing one of the easiest bosses. The worst character is Xexemoth, and he is unlocked by killing one of the hardest. Even beating the game only rewards a mediocre spear.
You know what the funny part is? One of the best spears in the game is supposed to be unlocked after completing the bestiary - this would require multiple runs beating the same bosses multiple times along with all the worst enemy types until you collect all 60+ entries. But by the grace of God, the programmers had a fit of good sense and didn't introduce the change - as such, the weapon Judgment is unlocked after only 20 entries. Far more doable and actually makes the early game fun past the first few runs.
The wildest part is that Judgment isn't even *that* great a weapon and it would have taken one of the most tedious challenges to complete *AND* you would have no new challenges to test it on. I mean, maybe Elite mode - but you seriously have a better chance of beating Elite mode before filling out the Bestiary.
And that's still not the craziest part of this game. In the weirdest of weird moves, legendary runes are almost never seen in this game. Oh they exist and in the hands of a player that knows their business they can be very useful, but I know for a fact there are multiple players that beat the final boss and never seen one. Again, this is the dev trying to make the player feel like they have earned it, but i'm gonna be honest: unless that rune has the power to one-shot a boss, it is a little excessive to put 10 hours between every rune a player sees. I myself had only seen 1 or 2 in the 40 hrs I put in before I got the key spear and both of them, while powerful, were by no means game changers.
So with all these petty grievances aside, why should you play it if the rewards suck and the gameplay is generally unpolished, often breaking its own rules? To be honest, the biggest reward this game has to offer are the hunts themselves. Just the sheer spectacle of the 4 tent pole bosses justify the asking price. And just like I said at the start, it is a unique concept I haven't seen anywhere else.
Just goes to show: flying in a hurricane with an airplane made of banana bread is a terrible idea, but what a story to tell!
