Blue Estate Reviews
Crude, sexist, and borderline racist, Blue Estate aims low in search of laughs – and still misses the target by a mile. Even fans of the source material will be disappointed as it fails to capture the spirit of the comic, instead squandering its roster of interesting characters in the worst possible way. Should you manage to cut through its juvenile veneer, you'll actually find a competent rail shooter – the problem is that the complete lack of originality will ensure that your interest will derail well short of its destination.
The game has boss fights in an attempt to mix it up, it looks decent but nothing really befitting the new generation of consoles and it sounds fine too. The production values are there, then, but everything about it screams failure. For a game based on a comic book it's suspiciously tedious and wide of the mark in terms of its humour - although we recognise that is subjective so you might take more from it than we did - but really the choices behind the control scheme mean that it fails in terms of what we're here to assess; the game. From the moment you switch it on you're wondering why you downloaded it, and the developers have no excuses. Either their decision to go only for gyroscopic controls via the DualShock 4 was wrong, or: their inability to code and rein in the motion controls to do what they needed to do has left them dressing up their failure as a purposeful choice.
Blue Estate's biggest crime is in its failure to bring anything new to a genre that's barely been attempted for a decade. Many of its mechanics feel dated in comparison to 1998's The House of the Dead 2, which at least offer branching story paths and varied enemies to mix it up a little. If you go in expecting a rail-shooter and nothing more then it's not necessarily bad, but the impotent humour and monotonous conveyor belt of enemies grows old throughout its 3-4 hour length.
Blue Estate isn't a long game and despite the leaderboards, it is unlikely to be one you'll revisit time and time again. However, it is genuinely fun to play and in the short time you spend with it, you'll get a great deal of enjoyment. If you have any interest in lightgun style games, then pick this up.