GENRE
	Shooter
	DEVELOPER
	Budcat Creations
	PUBLISHER
	Majesco
	NUMBER OF PLAYERS
	1-4
	WI-FI ENHANCED
	Yes
	DS COMPATIBLE
	No
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After a disappointing run earlier this decade with the poor-selling Psyconauts and the poorly received Advent Rising, Majesco Entertainment has focused in recent years on casual value titles such as Furu Furu Park, Wild Earth: African Safari and Cooking Mama: Cook Off. All of these titles have been original in their own way but aren't intended for a hardcore audience.

Enter Blast Works, which looks like anything but a casual game. Part shooter, part game designer, part design-swapper, Majesco and developer Budcat Creations has created a game with steeply challenging combat and deep developmental tools. For those with the determination to weather its intimidating curve, Blast Works is a solid genre-crossing experience.

visuals

Blast Works opts for stability and versatility over raw technical power. Everything in the game is polygonal, from the level backgrounds to the enemies and weapons. This design decision gives the game a simplistic and fairly unremarkable appearance, but it means the game runs at a stable framerate, even in the midst of chaotic action. The game’s polygonal graphics are also a necessary ingredient to a game where every ship, bullet, enemy and level can be edited and customized by the user.

audio

A title like Blast Works suggests a bombastic soundtrack. That’s not the case. The aurals in the game are palatable but unremarkable. The music score is a light techno-pop style, and only one or two tracks stand out as catchy. The sound effects, too, are adequate but hardly world-changing. In short, nothing here is going to ruin the experience, but it isn’t going to make it, either.

gameplay

As the game’s subtitle suggests, gameplay consists of three key components: building, trading and destroying. Players can build custom ships and levels, trade those ships and levels with other players, and play through (and destroy) preset and custom levels. To understand the process, it might be useful to take each of these components in the order most gamers will likely attack them.

The destroy component of Blast Works is a side-scrolling shooter. The game is a direct descendent of the PC freeware title TUMIKI Fighters and is broadly similar to the likes of R-Type or Gradius. Combat consists of moving through each level, fighting waves of enemies, and confronting an endboss before moving onto the next level. Getting hit one time results in a loss of life, while extra lives are awarded every 10,000 points.

What makes combat in this game unique (as was the case with TUMIKI Fighters) is the ability to accumulate and incorporate destroyed ships and debris. Each enemy ship has a set number of hit points, represented at the lower-right portion of the screen, and when the enemy is defeated that enemy can be captured by touching it. Larger enemies might break up into several pieces of debris, each of which can be accumulated. Captured enemies serve three purposes: they provide valuable physical protection for the main ship, they steadily improve the player’s score, and they add to the main ship’s firepower. The resulting mass can be quite large and unwieldy, but the game also allows the player to retract the debris to create a compact vehicle; this creates a surprising amount of strategic depth.

Combat comes in three flavors: Campaign, Arcade and User Level. (Each of these modes also has three selectable levels of difficulty.) Campaign mode allows players to play through the various campaigns in the game. Arcade mode is similar in many respects to campaign mode, except that the player attempts to play through all of the campaigns sequentially without dying. User Levels are custom levels created by the player or other gamers which can be either created in the game or downloaded from the internet.

Combat control supports three control schemes, including the Wii remote and nunchuck, the Wii remote alone and the classic controller. We played the game with the first of the three and found it to be perfectly suited to the game’s simple controls. Combat uses an analog stick for movement, the B button to fire and the Z trigger to retract captured debris. Control is generally sharp and responsive.

The combat mode has a lot going for it, but it also has a few caveats. For one, the combat can be quite difficult for a single player, even on the easiest difficulty setting; this is especially true later in the game, when the waves of enemies become fierce and more resilient to attack. Second, the campaign is fairly short and straightforward, with nothing in the way of narrative -- any lasting appeal will come from unlockable bonus games (which are rather difficult to acquire) and the non-combat game components. Third, the shooting of the default player ship in campaign and arcade mode seems to have some sort of mild autotarget, which slopes up or down depending on enemy location; the problem lies in the fact that it doesn’t always work right, making it difficult to hit smaller enemies or more concealed boss weak points with precision.

The trade component of Blast Works allows players to upload and download a myriad of ships, bullets, enemies and levels to play. The hub for trading is BlastWorksDepot.com. Players wishing to trade on the Depot need to go to the site via a web browser and register their Wii. Afterwards, they can queue up assets for download on the website and then return to the game to bring the assets directly into the system. The whole process is more cumbersome than it really ought to be, but it works and is one of the more interesting uses of Wii’s Wi-Fi to date. As of press time, there was a large body of good-quality assets out there for downloading, many of which reflected tremendous time and effort. Gamers who have lamented the lack of add-on content in other Wii titles won’t be disappointed here.

The build component allows the player to create, either from scratch or from a template, just about anything that could possibly be used in the game. Everything from specific kinds of bullets to entire levels can be created, tweaked and then played or uploaded. The editor used to do this uses the Wii remote’s IR functionality and is extremely robust and reasonably intuitive. At the same time, the depth and complexity of creating three-dimensional ships and lengthy levels is so sharply intimidating that only a few gamers out there may dare to plunge into it. The potential, however, is tremendous; this is nowhere more obvious than the many assets that has been uploaded to the trade depot.

multiplayer

The game features offline multiplayer options for its destroy modes: arcade, Campaign and User Levels. Arcade mode and User Levels mode allows up to four players to play simultaneously; campaign mode allows for up to two. Despite the onscreen chaos, two player combat proves a far more entertaining experience than a single-player trip. In addition, having two players on board also helps mitigate the game’s ferocious difficulty level and enables players to more manageably unlock Blast Work’s extra content. Having three or four players in the game, however, offers diminishing returns and enough extra chaos that it is less enjoyable.

overall

Blast Works, is, on many levels, quite an achievement. The game is one part shooter, one part game creator and one part trading station; and all three of these components function well. The shooter is unique and offers engaging co-op play, the editing tool is deep, and the trade depot has a large variety of free downloadable content. Budcat Creations deserves praise for creating a game hat not only offers a lot to do, but creates a game designed -- surprisingly -- with the hardcore gamer in mind.

Ultimately, though, the game’s overall value lives or dies on the tastes of the player. If you’re a pure shooter fan and have no interest in level design, you’re probably better off with a game like Geometry Wars Galaxies or one of the many TurboGrafx-16 shoot ‘em ups available on Wii’s Virtual Console. If, on the other hand, you are intrigued by the notion of creating your own shooter and sharing that with the world, Blast Works may well be worth your cash.

8.0/10