Blockstorm (PC)

In the beginning was the Block…

… or something like that is how the creation story for the bizarre world Blockstorm must go, a game full of maps as whimsical they are challenging. This new indie spectacle from GhostShark looks and feels like a crossover between Quake and Minecraft. The very idea of a fast-paced PvP multiplayer shooter in arenas you build yourself is something that’s sure to have many gamers salivating. Read our test review to find out if this actually adds up to long-term motivation, and whether such a mash-up is as awesome as it sounds.

A bare-bones shooter

One thing’s for sure – Blockstorm is not Battlefield! Sure, it has some really smooth shooting mechanics, a wide variety of weapons, and you can customize your equipment – at least the basics, anyway. That’s where the similarities end, though. If you’re looking for tactical combat, prefer balanced team-based gameplay, or like to camp at the edge of the map, you’re in the wrong game. Blockstorm is messy, tends towards close combat, and is incredibly funny. Damn sniper’s barricaded himself in between a wall and a few boxes? No problem – just whip out your shovel and dig through the wall. Once you’ve put a knife to that sneaky bastard’s pixelated throat, you can repair the wall and take his place behind the boxes yourself.

That’s pretty much how every deathmatch goes in Blockstorm. It sounds repetitive, but it’s actually a ridiculous amount of fun. Levolution is yesterday’s news – in Blockstorm, everything can and will be destroyed, leaving no stone upon another when it’s all over. Currently, Blockstorm only offers two gameplay modes besides the classic Deathmatch. One of them is Team Deathmatch (which I really hope needs no explanation here), and the other is called Assault. In Assault, your team has to capture a certain point on the map – it’s enough to just stay alive as long as possible on the marked area. But because the level structure is so variable, this usually ends up being a nice challenge and doesn’t degenerate into a camping contest. The developers say they’re going to be introducing eve more challenges later.

Retro Visuals

Blockstorm is not a pretty game. But it gets the job done, and the pixelated graphics have a charm all their own in the user-created maps (see below). If you’re playing Blockstorm and expecting to see highly-polished advanced graphics, then you’d better prepare to be sorely disappointed. But the graphics aren’t exactly what you’d call “bad” either – everything’s made of blocks, that’s it. Any other word on the graphics would be one word too many, as the core of the game are the quick matches and the level editor.

Building Blocks

The thing that really makes Blockstorm fun to play in the long-term is the game’s level editor. Like in Minecraft, you can build castles, arenas, dungeons, or whatever else may strike your creative fancy. Using a wide variety of blocks, which don’t just come in different colors and textures but have different sound absorbing and damage resistance values, users are able to constantly create new battlefields, limited only by their own creative abilities. It’s a simple concept, but it offers an incredible amount of variety for the shooter part of the game.

The editor’s only real drawbacks are its somewhat cumbersome mechanics and its controls, which take some getting used to. But after a bit of practice it won’t take long before you get the hang of building levels, and the editor really encourages you to experiment with the various construction materials. One of the only negative things in all this is that there’s no way to “protect” levels you’ve built yourself – once a level is played, it becomes available to all accounts and can be modified even further. I’m sure they did this so levels could “go viral”, but it might also lead to some players being unwilling to put their level designs online. After all, who wants to play in a near-exact copy of a level they designed themselves, maybe with some personal elements in it, except that some other player has changed it around to suit his own purposes?