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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid, fun platformer in the "old school" tradition., October 16, 2002
Blinx: The Timesweeper is a fun and fairly well made platformer cast in the mold of some classic games but with a new twist: the ability to manipulate time. I read a fair number of reviews on the internet before buying this game and a distressing number of bad reviews nearly dissuaded me from the purchase. I'm quite glad though, that a few poisitve and insightful comments convinced me to take the plunge.Starting with the basics, Blinx is a three dimensional (actually four dimensional) platformer game. That is to say, you control a character who has to move through large levels and leap about and stay alive while defeating a fairly large number of quirky enemies and rooting out hidden secrets. For a plot you have your basic save the world, get the girl scenario. The controls for Blinx are a little difficult to manipulate at first, not because the scheme is particularly complex, but because of the camera. A faulty camera is the first pitfall in any three dimensional, third person game and the deisgners of Blinx, recognizing this, put the camera in your hands. You choose the angle and can even go into an "over the ears" mode which lets you look around from a first person perspective. The challenge in controlling Blinx is figuring out how to move while constantly manipulating the camera to your best advantage, as "forward" and "backward" and such change with the camera. It can be a little disorienting at times, but that's just part of the game. If you can get that skill down early, a lot of the tougher sequences in the game get a lot easier. Ultimately, Blinx can move and look any which way, you've just got to learn how to make him do it and the challenge is subtle, especially in heated battles where you don't have time to choose your angles carefully. What makes Blinx special and different are the time manipulation features. If you gather certain cmbinations of special "time crystals", you can alter the game with the stdandard VCR controls: pause, slow, rewind, fast forward, and record. All the powers are cool and useful although they sometimes seem under-utilized, which is to say that there a lot of levels and enemies you can easily defeat without any of the time manipulations. But they are still fun to use, with rewind, record, and pause seeming to be the most powerful. Rewind is most often used to reconstruct crumbled or destroyed features of a level, pause is a useful combat trick to say the least, and record is a multipurpose tool, making you twice as deadly in combat or giving you a spare hand to open special, double triggered doors and such. You can gather crystals by walking over them or by sucking them up with your vacuum cleaner. Blinx is equipped with one heck of a vacuum cleaner and he uses it to suck up garbage to fire at his enemies. Graphically and musically speaking, Blinx is dripping with cuteness. The graphics are amazing and the landscapes are trippy and highly detailed although there seem to be an awfully lage number of invisible walls keeping you out of some of the nooks and corners. The music is your typical platformer fare, and would have gone perfectly with Sonic or Mario games of the past, although it is more techinically involved than some of those games' music and obviously beyond the capabilites of the older consoles we all played those games on. Blinx is a long game of standard levels punctuated by occasional boss levels that you move through in a linear fashion. However, you can go back and replay old levels as many times as you wish in order to stockpile gold or to perfect your technique. Indeed, you have to go back to some of the old levels once you have better equipment as some secrets are only accessible once you have used some of your cash to upgrade your vacuum cleaner. Some objects are far too heavy and large for the sweeper you start with to handle. The most common complaints people have made about this game are about its camera, its difficulty, and its music and feel. Most of these complaints are unwarranted. The camera is challenging to learn to use, but once you do it is quite powerful and flexible. Good games should be difficult. An easy game you can pass in a few hours without dying or having to really think or explore new strategies is just a waste of time. The difficult stages you encounter later in the game go a long way towards giving it that "old school" feel. And finally, the game is supposed to be "cute". If you don't think you can stomach that sort of Hello Kitty brand of cuteness, then Blinx, despite its excellent and innovative glameplay, is not the game for you. Overall, Blinx is an excellent game for both kids and adults. It is fresh, challenging, and worth adding to the collection of any fan of platformers.
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