Developer: Little Chicken Game Company
Publisher: Kanolio Ventures Ltd
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Blaze Revolutions – Preview
Weed. Cannabis. Marijuana. Chronic. You must have lived under a rock to not notice that the weed discussions are slammed right open the last few years. While American discussions and legalization continue to grow, the Dutch law and toleration for the drug stay the same. Yet it wouldn’t surprise anybody that Blaze Revolutions is still a game coming from Dutch grounds that’s all about weed. Well, weed and dystopian oppression. All this in Early Access.
In Blaze Revolutions you join the two ”Blaze” kids, Winston and Janet Blaze, who are basically born resistance fighters in an oppressed world. The dystopian surroundings are controlled by the SOMA corporation, a business that specializes in getting you i.e. hooked on their VR equipment. By being such a mighty company whose only interest is profit and a monopoly, the SOMA corporation has ruined the surface of the world as the air grew unfit to breathe. This is the opposite of the Blaze family, as they try to topple SOMA by growing weed and getting their influence growing to wake sheeple up out of their VR-induced dreams (and get them stoned in the process). It’s a classic and solid story, which is a good start.
Playing the game in Early Access feels smooth mostly, though there are a few bugs with the decent music suddenly malfunctioning or a bit of communication of i.e. mission objectives that could have been indicated better. Sounds are limited to sirens and, for example, a sound indicating that text is moving when people are talking and it’s fine for what it is. Graphically, the game looks alright where especially stuff like dialogue portraits bring something lively to the game. However, it could use some polishing to make the scenery and gameplay blend in better. The pathfinding and such work great, even though the areas where you can move feel rather limiting.
Partially this feeling of being limited is because of how the gameplay is split up. There are two different parts of RTS gameplay involved in Blaze Revolutions. The limited movement is one part because of the cops-and-robbers type of gameplay where you drive in your car from a top-down view (which is always the case during the game) to control your heroes like in an RTS and avoid cop cars. You select the hero car and it moves to where you click on a small network of roads that simply forces you to use the existing infrastructure to reach your destination. Such destinations can be either story-related buildings or buildings to do the other bit of gameplay which is focussed on base building.
When not in a story-related run on the road where you avoid the police patrols by hiding from their field of view, you take over apartments and other buildings that give you a place to build or followers that can be put to work. You then build urban weed farms on rooftops as well as coffee shops, houses, and more on spaces specifically appointed to build a bit. By doing so you gain influence which slowly pushes back the area controlled by SOMA as well as that their main buildings get blown up by it. This is where perhaps the biggest nail sticking out of Blaze Revolutions resides so far.
First of all, the campaign missions build up incredibly slowly towards the full possibilities of the game, and even then the missions are rather short and not so challenging. Most of the time you just have to work out the best route towards your goal and that’s it, not much thinking or trial-and-error needed. Compared to regular RTS games, the base building has barely any purpose. Normally you would create troops and take over the enemy, or at least there is more strategy involved. In Blaze Revolutions, it feels like this base building aspect comes up short because literally all you do is build the appropriate buildings available, and then you win. It lacks a bigger gameplay aspect of a grander design.
Conclusion
So far, as Blaze Revolutions is in Early Access, there is solid ground to make a weed-related game that has something to tell. The story is firm enough to be entertaining, and while there are some bugs to be removed and graphics to be polished, the gameplay as it is works fine as well. The biggest point of critique is that the gameplay feels like something is lacking, as the base-building side of the gameplay doesn’t seem to serve any purpose besides literally building some structures that automatically do everything for you to win the game. Blaze Revolutions needs to be built upon to become a game that’s also about gameplay and not only about the story or message it’s sending.
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