Customer Reviews

Blazeon: The Bio Cyborg Challenge

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I don't know what I find about horizontal shoot em' ups I find so cool, I mean I love all types of game genres be it platformers, racing, adventure, survival horror, and shoot em' ups of ANY perspective are really fun, but horizontal shooters are just beautiful games in my heart. Why? Don't ask me, I still don't know! But I will say that it's hard for me to detach this love of horizontal shooters from my heart and why I found BlaZeon such a fun game despite some rather glaring design flaws.

Now I don't want to demonize this game because it has a few good things going for it. For one, your space ship can assume the role of mechs or robots in the game which enable you to use a lot of different attacks. Only problem is the game forces you to depend on these mechs in order to survive and sometimes the game only lets some of the best mechs on screen for a few seconds before disappearing.

Also, the game has a pretty cool soundtrack! It starts out okay, then it ascends into some of the funkiest space music I've ever heard in a game before plunging back to being just okay. Still, the middle part of the game is just rockin' I still can't believe no one ever lists this game as their favorite SNES game soundtrack.

The game has its issues though. For one, the graphics are good... not so much bad, just good, really. If anything, they REALLY should've avoided using the color pink both for the ship AND for the enemies, but that was the case for any shooter in the early 1990's. Then there's the pace. I don't know why, maybe it's the whole arcade porting process, but for some reason there are moments in the game that drag on for almost a minute straight with NOTHING happening. Why? Damned if I know. I have to admit the spaceship looks a little embarrassing; you can change the color scheme depending on difficulty and in retrospect it doesn't look too bad especially seeing how it has some kind of claw-hook beneath it, but the ship still looks awful, it's like a toy you get from a vending machine.

I think the worst aspect about BlaZeon though is the ending... I won't spoil anything else for you, but it's one of the most, vacuous, inconsistent, nihilistic game endings I've ever seen; one of these days, I'm making a list of all the games I ended up falling in love with that hurt me back with such painful, dull, apathetic endings and BlaZeon shares a piece of the cake.

But try not to get me wrong, I still recommend this game because I had fun with it and it shows some semblance of care in its making. Not a lot, but some at least. if you love obscure, horizontal space shooters, you'll love this game because it's just that.