Blasterd is a fast-paced augmented reality shooter that is all about achieving the highest score and claiming your place on the global leaderboard.
I’ve played lots of AR shooters and I have to admit that it’s not common to come across good ones. Some of my favorite ARKit shooters are ghosthuntAR, AiR Monster, Ghosts ‘n Guns, and AR Space Wars among others. Blasterd has joined this list of fun and engaging ARKit shooters for those reasons I am covering in this review.
Blasterd Gameplay
In Blasterd, players need to clear up a wall of hexagon tiles in each level by shooting at them using different guns. You start off with a slow-shooting gun that has unlimited ammo and can unlock more guns using in-game currency. The other guns can also be temporarily unlocked if you shoot a tile that gives you a random weapon or ammo.
Those unlocked weapons or those which you get during the match have limited ammo, so you need to use them wisely. You can just spray bullets here, you need to aim properly and consider the slow reload times of the guns. Missing shots just means that you are going to miss an opportunity to clear targets and therefore might fail to clear out all the tiles before time runs out.
Each level has a time limit and the player needs to clear up all the standard tiles before the time runs out. The difficulty increases in difficulty as you progress.
There are different tiles in the game. Here is an image that shows you what each one does:
You can also maximize your score by successfully and sequentially shooting certain marked tiles.
As you level up the tiles will start moving around quite erratically, making it harder to take them out. this is probably a good time to shoot down the freeze buff or buy one at the store with the currency that you earn after each match.
Blasterd plays in front of you, which means you’ll need to hold your iPhone or iPad in front of you and aim the center of the screen towards the tile you want to shoot down. It’s important to quickly understand the layout of the different tiles so you can clear them out as fast as possible. Maybe it’s better to make sure you don’t destroy bombs close to the “Decrease time” debuff as it can cause you to lose the match. Sometimes it’s better to wait a bit until the bomb tiles are aligned with other tiles and then detonate them so you can clear more tiles this way.
Blasterd definitely designed to be more engaging and encourage strategic thinking than just being a casual straight on shooting gallery AR game. It also requires precision aiming—it doesn’t have aim-assist like the Augmented Reality (AR) game AR Space Wars.
Arcade Style Action
Blasterd feels very arcadic with its fast-paced gameplay and brilliant visual and sound effects. No doubt that the splashy vibrant colors and visual effects make it more thrilling to play. It’s fun watching score numbers flying out from the tiles and big multiplier and combo score flying on the screen with vibrant colors and splashy animations.
Looks amazing isn’t it, here are a few more examples.
I also really liked the amazing particle effects in this game, both for the explosions and the shooting. It’s hard to describe it in words, I recommend that you check the gameplay video above and observe it yourself. deliberately captured the video in the evening so you can clearly see the beauty of those bright and colorful visual effects.
If you like splashy colorful visual effects in arcade video games, you’ll those in Blasterd. In fact, Blasterd reminded me of the gorgeous and vivid visual effects in ghosthuntAR: Survival. I’m not hinting that this is the most important aspect of the game, but it definitely makes it more thrilling and exciting to play because of that and enhanced the visual experience for sure.
This game passed the visual experience test with flying colors, so to speak.
Some Problems
I had a few problems with the game. First of all, in order to maintain your progression, you have to unlock an item that allows you to save your progression and replay previous levels. For some reason, it didn’t work for me. I bought it, but the progression wasn’t saved and I wasn’t able to continue where I left off or replay previous levels.
Furthermore, no matter what I did, I wasn’t able to access the leaderboard, the button didn’t work. I can just assume that these are bugs. I hope that the developer is reading this and he can contact me so we can resolve it together. I don’t like starting all over again from level 1 and like having the option to save the progression. I hope this can be solved in a timely manner if it is indeed a bug.
Conclusion
Blasterd turned out to be a nice surprise. It reminds me the fun that I have playing pinball games when it’s all about getting the highest score. I love playing these type of games, especially when I can compete against other people and strive to break their best score.
The game plays beautifully in augmented reality (AR). The game asks you to scan the floor, but from that point on you can play it even in the smallest area without any rough limitations.
The game has beautiful visuals that enhance the experience and making the game more enjoyable and exciting to play—same goes for the sound effects and soundtrack, spot on.
The game is fun, addicting and challenging. I like the various weapons and the unique tile’s functionality which add interesting dynamics to the gameplay.
If you love arcade shooters and enjoy playing the other shooters that I recommended playing, I have no doubt that you’ll enjoy this one as well. There are so many AR shooters that lack that extra effort to make them feel great, but the developer of Blasterd, Awespace, definitely nailed it down very well—Recommended.
You can download Blasterd from the App Store here.