Blink: Rogues

It may look like ye olde SNES or PC shoot'em'ups, but it's not a rehash of those. Here you play in hot seat with a friend and you try to blast each other up using weapons and power-ups more commonly found in games like Doom or Quake. It's a smart game with a fresh take on a classic genre.

Blink: Rogues puts a modern spin on a classic genre. While the innovative mechanics are easy to learn, using them effectively takes skill and practice. The voxel-like backdrop provides a good amount of atmosphere, without being too distracting. The special weapons feel powerful and heavy. While the difficulty curve is smooth enough, one gets the feeling that there is always an extra amount of points to be squeezed out by better movement, aim or strategy.

Blink: Rogues is a fun, familiar shoot 'em up game with an interesting new concept in the form of teleporting from one half of the screen to another in order to escape obstacles and enemies alike. I thoroughly enjoyed the game even though I don’t usually play within this genre. I’d definitely suggest giving it a go! https://youtu.be/OL7ssDW5MR0 8.0/10

[h1][url=https://www.nookgaming.com/blinkrogues-review/]Click here for the full review with more detail and pictures[/url][/h1] It’s time to play a shooting gallery in space – we are entering the world of Blink:Rogues, developed and distributed by Fox Dive Studio To start with, I will be honest and say I was genuinely curious how a simple genre like the “shoot’em up” could be innovated further. Space Invaders (1978) started its popularity and since that time, some great games have come from it like Mushihimesama in 2011. That said, I feel like many games in this genre feel like they are almost the same game, with some small differences and a new texture pack thrown over the top. Blink: Rogues, however, adds a new spice to the genre by mixing it up with some new mechanics, which we will go through in this review. First, I would like to talk about the game overall. There are two options to play on – Story and Multiplayer. I started off with and had some fun playing the story mode. It was a genre I hadn’t played for a while, so I had to get back into gear and recover the skills needed to play it well. You and your friend (or should I say rival now) each start on one of the sides, shooting the enemy in your own merry way using a variety of tools loaded onto your ship’s arsenal. These tools include a scattershot, a laser and a missile of sorts, the type of which depends on which enemy you are facing. At any time, however, you can switch to your friend’s side to help them out with enemies on their side and to try and achieve 100% of the opponents killed. The game rewards you for this by giving you an amount of stars depending on how many you kill: 50% of the enemies is one star, 75% is two stars and finally 100% is three stars. This acts as a sort of completion system, to encourage you to keep going back to levels you have not achieved all the stars on yet. Unfortunately, despite the interesting concept, I did encounter some issues in the gameplay. I talk about these more in the full review. In conclusion, Blink: Rogues is a good game when you need some time between games in order to empty your mind from more complicated mechanics in order to play something fun and engaging to try to keep improving, I would recommend it for those who need a breath of fresh air or those who enjoy games like space invaders

It has plenty of clever ideas, but the execution lacks.

[h1]Before I played Blink: Rogues, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good[/h1]

☀️

[quote]Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades [/quote] [i]Sigh...[/i] I'm not going to sugarcoat it. If you truly believe this game "takes the shoot 'em up genre in a different direction" in a positive way or "feels a lot better to play than how it looks", you need to stop writing game reviews immediately. I honestly, truly don't know and don't understand how this game can have this much positive reviews, if bias is not involved. It feels like an unfinished product that is rushed to be released in its premature state. To my amusement, it turns out this game WAS in early access, yet I have seen early access and even abandoned games that were already in a much better state compared to how this game is like right now. Blink: Rogues changes the dominant formula of shmups from "attack the enemies who appear in front of you and try to survive" to "enemies just wander around the screen without minding you, and it's your job to kill as many as you can". The game feels less like a shmup, and more a shooting gallery... a very boring shooting gallery as a matter of fact; Because the enemy patterns are incredibly uninspired and nonsensical. Not only that, none of the enemies in this game seem wanting to target you aside from the bosses. They just suddenly spawn in the playing field, shoot some projectiles in their predefined directions without minding the player (or not, as some enemies don't shoot anything at all), and then leave the screen. And the way the gameplay is designed, just makes things worse. You see, I was not exaggerating when I said this game is a shooting gallery as that's literally your objective in each stage. The game splits the playing field in two halves, and expects you to use a teleportation ability named "Blink" to switch between them and kill the enemies that appear in each of them. Then, it evaluates your performance and gives you 1-3 stars at the end of each level, based on how many enemies you have killed. So that's the only thing you do in the campaign. You just play a level for 3+ minutes and kill as many enemies as you can to get the permission to do the same thing all over again in another stage. And there's no fail state either, as there is no lives system and you just spawn back after a few seconds. I think I don't have to tell you how boring and repetitive this game will feel like because of this gameplay design decision; Especially if you fail to get the required number of stars to unlock the next level, and have to repeat a stage again to improve your rating. And in the audiovisual department? The game still doesn't have anything to say. The levels look absolutely tasteless and bland, something that I never expected from a game powered by Unreal Engine 4. Some of the animations are incredibly stiff. The enemy designs are very uninspired. The music is monotonous at best, and utterly annoying at worst. A lot of stuff do not have any sound effects so for example, you never hear anything when you and enemies shoot at each other, or when your shots hit the enemies. I played this game for 20 minutes and had such a bad time with it that I blamed myself for not quitting it faster. It doesn't have anything to hook you in and if I had paid for it, I would honestly be chasing a refund as fast as I could. It may be free now, but please believe me when I say it offers nothing of value, and you are better off playing literally anything else. [h2]TL;DR[/h2] It may be free, but it does not deserve your time regardless. What we have here is one of the most boring and unrewarding shooting galleries that definitely feels unfinished, and is masquerading as a shmup.