BLANK SPACE

Review update after full completion.
-------------------------------------------------------
This game can be characterized as a collection of hits and misses. I was really waiting for the release, but unfortunately it didn't deliver as much as I expected.
BLANK SPACE is a hybrid of twin-stick shooter and spacesim, two main features of which are Cowboy Bebop inspired setting seasoned with old gangster cinema aesthetics with mostly all the characters being are gun-blazing astronauts, and realistic anti-gravitation physics with all of its pluses and minuses. First of all, it's better not to approach this game as a regular arcade shooter with smooth fixed movement speed. Movement learning curve in BLANK SPACE is almost as high as in racing games, as you have to keep in check both your acceleration, your momentum, and your weapon knockback. As a little relief, your protagonist Lino is able perform prolonged dodge rolls in space, that allow you both to avoid projectiles, and to move in the direction you want.
Battles take the most part of the game, and they're divided by two different types: showdowns with regular enemies, and duels with bounty hunters. Regular battles doesn't present much challenge and variety: once you get used to the controls, you realize that the enemies are nearly harmless, and while the gunfight feels satisfying, you don't really have any entertaining factors on the levels aside from shooting randomly floating enemies in the room --> move to the next room ---> rinse and repeat. There's nearly zero interaction with the environment, and the debris flying around is mostly irritating than fun to play with (if anything, I found the missions in the open space with as little debris as possible to be much more entertaining). Also, there's no passive upgrades aside from the ones increasing your health/speed/damage, no EXP, or other usable stuff you can find on the levels, so there's zero reason to clean all the rooms from enemies. Now, while the regular fights aren't that engaging, the duels with bounty hunters is where the game shines: they're actually dangerous and nimble foes, every one of them has their own main and secondary weapons, rechargeable shield and even different personalities. Come to think of it, BLANK SPACE could work much better as a boss rush game akin to Furi, without all the barebones "kill'em all" missions in between.
Aside from battles, there's a semi-management part, where you move your spaceship on the map, choosing your equipment/weapons/missions, also you can visit Tavern checking for the news, for new characters, or to buy new addition to your armory. There's only 4 main weapons in the game: semi-auto rifle, shotgun, revolver, and autorifle. Basically, I found the very first weapon you get the most viable one, as it has both decent damage, and accuracy. Shotgun was fun to play with, but it has long reload time, and its damage actually isn't that high. Apart from the main weapons, there're secondary ones, most of which come with limited ammo. Honestly, almost all the secondary weapons proved to be nearly useless, with only katana (perhaps, the most fun weapon in the game), and the initial missles being an exception.
Aside from the management part, there're also outer hazards in the world, and you can be ambushed by rival ship while on the move to next location. Nothing really special about it, you just wreck enemy ship before they wreck yours, and the more damage your ship gets, the more expenses you have to pay. Alternatively, you can get a SOS-call from a ship attacked by gangsters, and if you help them, you'll get some tech points for upgrades.
Surprisingly enough, the game also includes a decent story with cutscenes, that revolves around a trio of survivors of Rocco mafia family, whose Don was betrayed and killed by his own older son, with Lino, the younger son and the protagonist of the game, striving to take revenge and revive his family back from the ashes. However, the plot presentation is undeveloped, and often the transition between events feel weirdly fast, not to mention that the characters barely have any interaction with each other between the missions, as well as they barely get any details about their past, their own stories, or the character growth.
Advantages of the game:
- Original setting, quirky characters
- Gunplay is fun, once you take a grip on the movement
- Katana is fun to use
- Bounty hunter arenas
- Well implemented movement physics in anti-gravity conditions
- Comfortable controls layout (the mouse aiming still deserves some calibration, though)
Disadvantages:
- Every type of missions has pretty much the same layout with minor differences, and while there're various rooms on the spaceships, all of them have nearly zero exploration value both in terms of lore and rewards.
- No skill tree, passive abilities, or gameplay changing upgrades. At most, you can upgrade you dps, armor, speed, and the number of weapon slots.
- Underwhelming arsenal that doesn't include rocket launchers or something else that differs from bullet spreading guns.
- Broken hitboxes on the enemy ship parts. On the Official Ship mission, about 30% of your bullets pass through the target ship without damaging it. Same goes for the pursuer ship front guns on the ambush missions.
- Destroyable environment elements require to put a million bullets into them to break.
- English translation is a bit rough around the edges (it's not that bad though).
- Poor optimization and very high demands on hardware. My 16gb craptop could pretty smoothly handle Nier: Automata on hobo resolution (800x600), and Risk of Rain 2 on the third lap, here it barely survives on the ship infiltration missions while on the lowest resolution (500x400, I think), and falls to coma if anything of the environment explodes or shatters on the screen. The loading time of the ship missions also take forever. All in all, if you've got a weak setup (and most important, a weak videocard), be prepared for a slideshow.
- Same music for every type of mission, and same music for every bounty hunter arena.
- This one is my personal, but for some reason the chunky gun sounds from the early videos of the game were heavily muffled on release, and that took down a nice percent of shooting drive.
So, with all of it being said, I didn't hate this game. It didn't turn out to be as good as I expected, but it didn't turn out to be a total catastrophe, either, and I had some fun with it. As steam doesn't have a mediocre option, I'll leave it on a positive note, taking into account that the dev could polish the rough corners, and maybe add some kind of DLC in the future.

Steam User 8

Reviewed 12.2022

Review update after full completion.
-------------------------------------------------------
This game can be characterized as a collection of hits and misses. I was really waiting for the release, but unfortunately it didn't deliver as much as I expected.
BLANK SPACE is a hybrid of twin-stick shooter and spacesim, two main features of which are Cowboy Bebop inspired setting seasoned with old gangster cinema aesthetics with mostly all the characters being are gun-blazing astronauts, and realistic anti-gravitation physics with all of its pluses and minuses. First of all, it's better not to approach this game as a regular arcade shooter with smooth fixed movement speed. Movement learning curve in BLANK SPACE is almost as high as in racing games, as you have to keep in check both your acceleration, your momentum, and your weapon knockback. As a little relief, your protagonist Lino is able perform prolonged dodge rolls in space, that allow you both to avoid projectiles, and to move in the direction you want.
Battles take the most part of the game, and they're divided by two different types: showdowns with regular enemies, and duels with bounty hunters. Regular battles doesn't present much challenge and variety: once you get used to the controls, you realize that the enemies are nearly harmless, and while the gunfight feels satisfying, you don't really have any entertaining factors on the levels aside from shooting randomly floating enemies in the room --> move to the next room ---> rinse and repeat. There's nearly zero interaction with the environment, and the debris flying around is mostly irritating than fun to play with (if anything, I found the missions in the open space with as little debris as possible to be much more entertaining). Also, there's no passive upgrades aside from the ones increasing your health/speed/damage, no EXP, or other usable stuff you can find on the levels, so there's zero reason to clean all the rooms from enemies. Now, while the regular fights aren't that engaging, the duels with bounty hunters is where the game shines: they're actually dangerous and nimble foes, every one of them has their own main and secondary weapons, rechargeable shield and even different personalities. Come to think of it, BLANK SPACE could work much better as a boss rush game akin to Furi, without all the barebones "kill'em all" missions in between.
Aside from battles, there's a semi-management part, where you move your spaceship on the map, choosing your equipment/weapons/missions, also you can visit Tavern checking for the news, for new characters, or to buy new addition to your armory. There's only 4 main weapons in the game: semi-auto rifle, shotgun, revolver, and autorifle. Basically, I found the very first weapon you get the most viable one, as it has both decent damage, and accuracy. Shotgun was fun to play with, but it has long reload time, and its damage actually isn't that high. Apart from the main weapons, there're secondary ones, most of which come with limited ammo. Honestly, almost all the secondary weapons proved to be nearly useless, with only katana (perhaps, the most fun weapon in the game), and the initial missles being an exception.
Aside from the management part, there're also outer hazards in the world, and you can be ambushed by rival ship while on the move to next location. Nothing really special about it, you just wreck enemy ship before they wreck yours, and the more damage your ship gets, the more expenses you have to pay. Alternatively, you can get a SOS-call from a ship attacked by gangsters, and if you help them, you'll get some tech points for upgrades.
Surprisingly enough, the game also includes a decent story with cutscenes, that revolves around a trio of survivors of Rocco mafia family, whose Don was betrayed and killed by his own older son, with Lino, the younger son and the protagonist of the game, striving to take revenge and revive his family back from the ashes. However, the plot presentation is undeveloped, and often the transition between events feel weirdly fast, not to mention that the characters barely have any interaction with each other between the missions, as well as they barely get any details about their past, their own stories, or the character growth.
Advantages of the game:
- Original setting, quirky characters
- Gunplay is fun, once you take a grip on the movement
- Katana is fun to use
- Bounty hunter arenas
- Well implemented movement physics in anti-gravity conditions
- Comfortable controls layout (the mouse aiming still deserves some calibration, though)
Disadvantages:
- Every type of missions has pretty much the same layout with minor differences, and while there're various rooms on the spaceships, all of them have nearly zero exploration value both in terms of lore and rewards.
- No skill tree, passive abilities, or gameplay changing upgrades. At most, you can upgrade you dps, armor, speed, and the number of weapon slots.
- Underwhelming arsenal that doesn't include rocket launchers or something else that differs from bullet spreading guns.
- Broken hitboxes on the enemy ship parts. On the Official Ship mission, about 30% of your bullets pass through the target ship without damaging it. Same goes for the pursuer ship front guns on the ambush missions.
- Destroyable environment elements require to put a million bullets into them to break.
- English translation is a bit rough around the edges (it's not that bad though).
- Poor optimization and very high demands on hardware. My 16gb craptop could pretty smoothly handle Nier: Automata on hobo resolution (800x600), and Risk of Rain 2 on the third lap, here it barely survives on the ship infiltration missions while on the lowest resolution (500x400, I think), and falls to coma if anything of the environment explodes or shatters on the screen. The loading time of the ship missions also take forever. All in all, if you've got a weak setup (and most important, a weak videocard), be prepared for a slideshow.
- Same music for every type of mission, and same music for every bounty hunter arena.
- This one is my personal, but for some reason the chunky gun sounds from the early videos of the game were heavily muffled on release, and that took down a nice percent of shooting drive.
So, with all of it being said, I didn't hate this game. It didn't turn out to be as good as I expected, but it didn't turn out to be a total catastrophe, either, and I had some fun with it. As steam doesn't have a mediocre option, I'll leave it on a positive note, taking into account that the dev could polish the rough corners, and maybe add some kind of DLC in the future.

BLANK SPACE

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Steam User 8