
Tendokore have made a name for themselves making bite-sized arcadelike experiences. We covered the excellent GyroBlade around a year or so ago now, and have been eager to dive into their next published title.
So here we are with Blind Shot, a game all about blindly shooting zombies. Sounds like fun! Let’s check it out.
Many thanks to the publisher for the review code.
A SHOT IN THE DARK
The idea behind Blind Shot is that you control a blindfolded commando stuck in the middle (literally) of a zombie horde. With his weapon in his hand (take your mind out of the gutter), you need to fend off the attacks on either side until your character’s eventual and inevitable death.
It works a little bit like One Finger Death Punch in practice, albeit to a much simpler degree. Rather than having enemies come at you thick and fast, Zombie instead come at you slowly but regularly. Tapping the stick left will shoot to your left, and tapping to the right will shoot to the right. All simple stuff. The difficulty comes in managing your ammunition count, avoiding supply drops (which can kill you if you’re underneath it!), and trying to kill frequently enough to prevent the zombie gauge from reaching the top – since once it does, it’s game over.
It’s a simple gameplay loop and one that could have been quite an effective one if it wasn’t quite a fundamental issue: the distinct lack of variety. There are only three stages on offer, with you having to grind out enemy kills until you unlock a ticket that allows you to play the next stage. There’s no target enemy kill amount to achieve in a single run, nor is there any kind of definitive end to a level . you just grind it out until you can play the next. Given that all three stages and the enemies within them are all pretty similar, it gets noticeably repetitive very fast.
And that’s mainly because of the lack of depth that the game offers. There are sub-weapons to utilise, but I found most of them to be a hindrance rather than a help. They’re a lot slower than simply shooting, are very limited in supply, and some of them can even kill you if you’re not being careful. As such, it’s far more advantageous to simply shoot enemies quickly until you can’t keep up with the zombie gauge. You can use your coins to unlock more things in the game, notably extra weapons; however, given the sub weapons are useless and the primary weapons feel more like reskins due to the lack of difference between them, it’s not that much of an actual incentive. I did find myself drawn towards the gun that fires electrical charges, but I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was actually any more useful than the starting pistol.
It’s a shame too, as the game does have quite an interesting core concept, that just isn’t fleshed out very much. With a larger variety of enemies, environments, and weapon differences, this could have been a really cool game to test out your reflexes; instead, it ends up offering a rather hollow experience for half an hour before that brief burst of fun eventually fizzles out.
VERDICT
A lack of overall variety and shallow gameplay prevents Blind Shot from being the addictive twitchy arcade shooter that it could have been. There’s a nice concept at the game’s heart, but it’s also one you’ll ultimately tire of relatively quickly.
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