Witch cards will drop: Blue Estate

Originally back in September, which I sometimes like to call Shootember, I was going to play through a mix and match of games that involve shooting. After playing Nuclear Throne, which definitely has quite a bit of shooting, technical problems and general apathy pushed me to play some other stuff. Blue Estate was on the list, having downloaded it after realizing it was something akin to a shooter without being a true FPS game.

Technically, I guess rail shooters are first person shooters, but with the rise of the first person shooter they went rapidly extinct with a handful of titles a year instead of being... Actually I guess they were never all that popular. The main difference between rail shooters and FPS games, to me, is actually less in the lack of movement and more what the lack of movement does to the game-play. Instead of being rewarded for careful placement and strategic play, it's basically all reaction time as your protagonist blunders into the line of fire over and over.

I honestly can't remember the last time I played a rail shooter and I definitely couldn't name one I thought was good or an exceptional product of the genre or whatever else. I'm not a great shot in real life and I'm not definitely not a great shot in this or in any other rail shooters. So we'll say this is one of those experiences where I find myself playing a game I'm not fundamentally suited toward playing, which is generally not an inspiring catalyst for a review.

On the other hand you've got to branch out and try different games, right? Even if all you end up doing is finding out you honestly don't like a given genre.


First thing first, before I review the rest of the game per se, I want to talk about the idea of time to gameplay. When you talk about 16-bit era console games, they had a little more time to gameplay than 8-bit games. Usually, they had some menus or options, and most people liked them. Being able to change difficulty and the like, good stuff. But there's a certain appeal to the 8-bit era, turn the console on, hit start and off you go.

This game? This game is dreadfully bad in terms of time to gameplay. Probably slower to actually get to the gameplay than say, I don't know, a RTS game. Multiplayer. It's sluggish and irritating and I'm bored by the time the game has finished loading through the first disclaimer. Then you go through some menues and it doesn't save at your last checkpoint so you start with some story and zzzz...

Blue Estate is a rail shooter and I imagine it is meant to be played with motion controls of some sort; I don't have any motion controls, so I ended up trying it out on the Xbox one controller I've been gradually wearing to bits. In terms of good ideas, well, I doubt it. It's fun having to use both sticks, but it feels designed around you being able to respond to enemies considerably faster than I found myself able to do. Part of that is player skill - Like I said, I haven't played rail shooters much if at all - but the other part is it just doesn't feel well tuned around being played with a controller. I mean you really need to get into the rhythm of using the sticks perfectly and I just didn't.

And honestly? Didn't want to. Rail shooter gameplay just feels like choking on dissonance, and this game does it poorly past that. See, Blue Estate is supposed to be less an action game and more based on what I am certain must be a hilarious dark comedy. The end result is sort of meandering gameplay while the game spews out tryhard edgelord nonsense nonstop. There's stuff I like, like the character's hair falling into his face and complaining about it while you swipe it aside. But the racism and edgy violence and general meh writing doesn't do anything for me and takes me out of the game.

Once you switch to mouse controls the game becomes much easier, and turns more into a game of following the set pieces. But man, the writing, it's just childish stuff.

Visuals are good, but repetitive. The game loops around the terrain and you basically re-do sections while shooting enemies you can't really tell apart. Some enemies have bulletproof vests and it's hard to pick them out, but I guess you're supposed to headshot everything anyway. It's really easy to chain headshots with the mouse, like whoa. The visuals, inversely, look... Really weird and bad when you're looking at a character I assume you're supposed to recognize from the comic. The "incredibly gorgeous"... Love interest (?) ... just looks kinda off, but maybe I'm not into tattoo'd strippers.

The audio and music are good, and the voice acting is on point. I wish the dialogue wasn't puerile tryhard stuff, but I can't fault the voice actors for working with what they're given. They did their jobs. Basically, in terms of presentation, the game is quite good. The game has tons of voice acting and it fills in what would otherwise be pretty dull nicely, although it repeatedly runs the "narrator talks about something boring and the game ____s him instead" joke.

In conclusion, I really don't know if this is a good rail shooter or a bad one, since I haven't played the genre in ages. The game runs fun, the content is visually interesting and the audio work is good, so I'd say if you like rail shooters it's probably fine? I found the game just got boring after a bit, I kept wanting to jam the keys down and run, but of course you can't.

The game also has some weird edgy tryhard humor. It hates nerds, it hates women maybe, it's racist in whichever direction it can go, and there's some vaguely transphobic stuff I guess. Maybe. I'm not too sure if mild cross-dressing on a villain is transphobic, but you know, if you find that stuff aggravating I suppose a review should put in a warning? Speaking of which, the game's disclaimer is like "these are all bad people" as though that writes off all the juvenile humor. It is what it is, and I'm moving on.