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Platform: Xbox Genre: Platformer Publisher: Microsoft Developer: Artoon ESRB: E (Everyone) Released: Q4 2002 Support AE! Buy Games Here:
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Blinx: The Time SweeperScore: 8.2 / 10 |
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Pros: - Great graphics - Time manipulation is one of this year’s freshest gaming ideas incorporated in a title - Very challenging on later game levels
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Cons: - Ten-minute time limit on each level leads to a lot of level replaying - Once you buy an item (especially upgraded sweepers) it should stay in your available inventory, not go back into the store’s stock - Items cost too much money - Gets generically formulaic
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Related Links: Review: Super Mario Sunshine (Gamecube) Review: Ratchet & Clank (Playstation 2)
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"Ever wish you could fast forward through the workday on a Friday?"
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Ever wish you could fast forward through the workday on a Friday? Or rewind back to just before you told your wife or girlfriend she DID look fat in those jeans this morning? How about a cloned recording of yourself doing the yard work while you’re inside watching the big football game? If you were part of the time sweeping force from the Xbox title Blinx: The Time Sweeper, you could indeed manipulate the flow of time. This is the unique gameplay feature that is the most innovative aspect of a game that unfortunately fails to match that inventiveness or originality in other facets of the game. Instead it is one of the numerous good-but-not-great collection of 3D action platformers that have attempted to follow the successful formula of the game that perfected the genre, Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64.
The game has you in the feline shoes of Blinx, one of the time sweepers that work in the Time Factory, which makes time, controls, and repairs its flow through multiple dimensions. The time sweepers use a vacuum-like contraption to suck up any misplaced time and keep the multi-worlds on the correct schedule. Time sweepers are so good at their jobs that there hasn’t been a major time-flux accident in 7,347 years. But now there’s a group of miscreants who wish to steal time and sell it to greedy other-dimensions.
One of the worlds is so affected by the pilfering of time that the Time Factory decides there is no other choice than to let it go unstable and vanish. But Blinx decides he’s willing to give it one more try to regain a steady time flow once again while taking down the band of time thieves.
Okay, maybe it sounds a little silly, and I don’t know what cats have to do with time, but hey does Mario’s storyline really sound any more sophisticated?
And by the way, there’s the mandatory princess to rescue. A game inspired by the Mario series wouldn’t be anything without a princess to save. For the most part, Blinx follows many of the tried-and-true conventions of the genre that many a game has placed into its makeup. It’s funny one of the levels is named Déjà vu Canals, because you’ll swear you’ve played games like this before.
You must venture from level to level, collecting items (including golden icons that are needed to buy new items from the shop), defeating enemies, squaring off against a big stage boss, until finally the day and the princess is saved. But Blinx has one of the remarkably freshest ideas instilled in a game this year, and it’s only an idea that can be implemented in an Xbox title.
Because of its built-in hard drive, the Xbox allows the idea of time manipulation to be used in Blinx. The recording device element (the Xbox hard drive) that is required to pull off this feature acts almost like a VCR, storing the information until the game’s hero needs it. Blinx can bend and twist time as necessary, and there are areas of the game where you will not be able to progress any further without using this “time VCR.” Blinx can slow down, speed up, pause, rewind, and record time to use in the game.
To get control over these basic time VCR abilities, Blinx must collect the numerous time crystals that are sprawled all over the game’s individual levels and also appear after each enemy is defeated. The time crystals take their cue from the Lucky Charms school of videogaming (you know, blue moons, red hearts, yellow stars, green clovers…er…diamonds) and must be collected in a specific manner to find their way into your time crystal inventory.
If you need to get a pause, for instance you need at least three blue moon time crystals and any other icon to get a pause time control. If four blue moons are collected, you get two pauses. This is the same for any of the icons. The only one that doesn’t perform a time control function is the red heart, which refills in the same way your health meters (three hearts fills one, four fills two). There is some strategy involved in the collection of the time crystals, because you can only fill a limited number of slots in your inventory with them.
When your inventory is filled to the brim, the next combination of time crystals collected will push out previously collected time controls, which may be a very bad thing indeed. If you are on a level that requires a record time control and you just lost the only one you had without any other enemies to go back and beat to squeeze out a few green diamonds, then you’ll be forced to restart the level.
These time controls come into play in at least one area of each of Blinx’s 36 levels in nine increasingly difficult stages. There are areas where two buttons must be pushed at once to open two doors needed to get to the next area of a level. But there’s only one of you. How do you get around the problem? Record Blinx standing on the furthest button. As soon as the record timer stops, the recording of Blinx will stand on the one button while the real Blinx can run over to the other button and stand on it, thereby opening both doors and allowing Blinx to hurriedly (the time controls last only about 15 seconds once activated) pass through both doors and advance.
Another time control, rewind, can help Blinx reach what seems like unreachable areas. An avalanche-collapsed section of the seventh stage, for example, cannot be passed any other way than having Blinx using a rewind time control, which restores the section to its stable state and giving Blinx passage past it. As I mentioned earlier, where frustration can set in is when you reach a point of no return, where you cannot pass without a specific time control that isn’t in your inventory and having no way of collecting the time crystals needed to get that particular time control. The only option left is to restart, or worse restart and having to travel on previous levels already beaten to get those time crystals.
Using time manipulation is the single-most creative idea Blinx has going for it. From there, it sinks into a formulaic game that although still extremely worth playing may be a disappointment to gamers expecting much better from Blinx. The monsters that compose your opposition on each level take various forms, but all stick to having a bouncy-ball shape, movement and attack approach.
Major time glitches create these monsters. There are smaller, easy-to-defeat creatures like the chrono blob, and harder to defeat baddies such as the molegon and dust herder. The end-stage bosses usually are just huge (and faster) variations of one of the smaller evil denizens that populate the levels. All are defeated by using the trash and items (rusted old cars, barrels, bombs) that are located all over each level by sweeping it up with your time sweeper and shooting it at an enemy. The bigger the item, the less hits it will take to defeat a time monster. You can only progress to the next level of the game once each of the levels is cleansed of any and all monstrous presences.
Another item collected are the cat medals hidden through each level. The only way to get the ultimate sweeper is to collect all 80 of the cat medals that are hidden throughout each level. Each level has three or four to find, and many are in hard-to-reach places. The biggest problem with the cat medals occurs on the more difficult stages of the game. You will be relieved to just complete a level, let alone worry about finding each and every cat medal. The incentive isn’t really high to go and retry harder levels, considering you have only ten minutes to complete each level. Otherwise, you must restart the level from cat-scratch.
Artoon made a mistake in the usage of the shop of each level. Blinx can go to the stage’s shops to buy new items like clothing, additional health and time control holders, weapons, and upgraded time sweepers. The problem here is that once you buy a time sweeper (or clothing), it doesn’t stay in your inventory when you purchase a different time sweeper in the next shop.
Instead, if you buy a new time sweeper the one you had in your possession goes back into the store’s stock. There are areas of the game where only one of the time sweepers should be used, but if you upgrade to another time sweeper, you no longer have a previously owned time sweeper. Instead, you must build up your gold by constantly replaying previously beaten levels to reacquire it. The items themselves are ridiculously high-priced. So much so that you may have to replay a level up to 50 times just to build up enough gold to purchase the higher-priced clothing or time sweepers. Again, even after you collect enough gold to buy from the shops you will lose the clothing or time sweeper you already have.
Even old-school platformers like Super Mario 3 on the NES kept an item inventory so you didn’t have to keep repurchasing or finding items already bought or found. Even worse, the clothing upgrades don’t seem to have any effect on the gameplay so it’s almost useless to bother buying Blinx’s variety of clothing choices.
You won’t find any fault with the visuals of Blinx. This is a sharp and vibrant game, richly rendered both in the character models and the sometimes-trippily colored levels. The lead hero, Blinx, looks especially good. This is one of the Xbox’s better-looking games. Although the worlds of Blinx aren’t fully explorable as Mario’s are due to the invisible walls placed all over, most levels are designed nicely to fit within the ten-minute time limit (some just barely though). The sound effects include the bizarre Japanese-sounding feline vocalizations of Blinx and his fellow time sweepers seen in the opening movie. The music is your standard platformer variety and will have you subconsciously humming it when you’re not even playing the game. Nothing great, but does the job.
Blinx’s controls and camera can cause some difficulty. Blinx doesn’t move too quickly. For a game that has a time limit on each level, there should have been a faster way of moving through the levels. The controller’s “X” button operates the sweeper (think Luigi’s apparatus from Luigi’s Mansion), both sucking in the trash and shooting it out. It generally works fine except when you’re trying to shoot an enemy from a distance.
Shooting trash seems to take on a mind of its own and unless you are up close and personal, shooting the trash into an enemy can be a crapshoot at best. The controlling of Blinx can be a little too loose at times. Stage seven is covered in snow and even standing still, Blinx slips and slides, which can cause some footing problems when good footing is needed. The game’s camera is adjustable, and works fine most of the game. But there are times when a lot of enemies in tight quarters make the camera absolutely impossible to see where you are in relation to the rest of the game’s action. Defeat usually quickly follows. A tighter camera would have made Blinx a less frustrating experience in these instances.
It’s a shame that there were some flaws in the fundamental design of Blinx, because the time manipulation feature and all-around sharp aesthetics gave the game a lot of potential for greatness. Instead of being the Mario challenger it could have been, the overall control, camera issues and the above-mentioned weak points of the game bring it down to good-but-not-good-enough status. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy playing through Blinx; it has enough good points to merit it being worth the time and effort it takes to complete it. Xbox owners looking for a game closely related to Mario 64 or the newer Mario Sunshine may want to give Blinx a try, but just know that it does have its problems that will affect how well you enjoy your time sweeping mission.
- Lee Cieniawa (November 14, 2002)
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