Blue Estate Review
Blue Estate is a crazy, funny and dark on-rails shooter told by a complete idiotic private investigator that is currently under investigation by the feds.
You play as Tony Luciano, a sexist pig and the one and only son of LA mob boss Don Luciano and you’ve started a war with the “Sik Brother” gang after the kidnapping of Cherry Popz (a pole dancer). The war gets totally out of hand when a group of Eastern European mobsters steal a 1 million dollar ransom that was meant to be used in exchange for “Blue Estate”, Don’s favourite race horse… yes, the game is absolutely crazy but it’s funny and works so well.
Tony is an absolute canon and clearly has a lot of skill (and experience) with guns and a massive criminal background. Being that the game is on-rails, you’ll be moving around the floors only when you have completed the current objective in that area. I suppose it’s fair to say that “Blue Estate” is very similar to the old Time Crisis games.
Yes the story is wacky and to be honest not important, but with the funny tongue-in-cheek humour and stupidity of the characters you can’t help but be sucked into the brilliant writing. I guarantee that you’ll laugh-out-loud at least once during every mission which has to be a great thing for the developers, because you’ll talk about it to your friends. I honestly can’t fault anything that talks in the game.
I was very sceptical about the gameplay because it doesn’t sound right… I was told “No, you don’t need playstation move or a light gun or anything because your controller is more accurate and will be more than capable of completing the task”, and they’re right. Controls are simple and the movements are super smooth; you point where you want to shoot and then press “R2” and there you have it, you shot an enemy. One thing I really liked was being unable to play the game in a Call of Duty type way. You can’t empty clip of your gun and then wait for an automatic reload. The game is multiplier and points-based so you’re forced to reload yourself at what you believe to be the appropriate time and if you mess it up, tough, it was all your fault and you just lost your sweet multiplier.
You can collect new weapons, ammo and other pickups such as health or slo-mo abilities and these are collected through shooting or a swipe of your touch-pad (which can also be used to melee enemies if they get too close). Blue Estate makes good use of the swipe pad because it’s slowly getting us PS4 owners to appreciate what it can do and that it can be useful rather than just a gimmick.
Visually, the game is superb with its vibrant colours, sharp edges and brilliantly crafted levels, and I loved moving around a strip club watching the damage effecting the environment that taking in all of the hard work that was clearly put into the game.
My biggest problem with the Blue Estate (in fact I think it’s my only issue) is that after a while of moving your controller to aim left, right, up and down, you go off balance in the sense that your crosshair feels wrongly placed. This was obviously going to be inevitable but there is an easy workaround and it comes in the form of “LB” - Press “LB” and the crosshair will be relocated to the centre of the screen allowing you to continue to mess Mo-Fo’s up. I do feel that this slightly affects the smoothness of the gameplay especially when you’re trying to take out multiple enemies and you’re sitting there bending your arms all over the place trying to get a proper aim on them, but it’s something that you’ll learn to deal with.
Overall you’d be crazier than Tony Luciano to pass up on Blue estate. It’s fresh, funny and not afraid to take some great gameplay mechanics from older games, mix them up to be even better than we’ve seen before and then throw them in your face for an awesome time. Oh, and if you have friends, why not play with someone else because you have that option, too.
YOU HAVE TO PLAY THIS!
9/10
Review By wicket2961
