Blacksea Odyssey

Blacksea Odyssey is a top-down, 2D, multi-directional shooter in which you ride a space scooter through finite, rectangular clouds of space debris, taking down enormous sea-space beasts with a spear and harpoon. It sounds pretty weird, though understanding the theme isn't vital to gameplay. The game concentrates on the accumulation of randomised runes you loot from enemies and chests, which give you combinations of poison, lightning, cannons, and extra speed, for example. The goal is to survive several rounds, beating each boss at the end.

You start by choosing one of several bosses to tackle who are dwelling in increasingly hostile environments. Each place has randomised stats that affect the frequency and hostility of enemies, the amount of elite monsters, the amount of credits dropped, the amount of keys, enemy health and so on. Players in theory can pick a level that fits their goals; they may want to amass keys first, or if they're low on health they can hit a location that seems a bit easier. Because the game is fairly well randomised, though, you may not find any place that quite fits your plans. This is a running theme.

You may start the game with a spear that enhances lightning powers and you never pick up any lightning runes. A more frequent issue is health, which is at a premium. If you don't happen to pick up health restoring items, find the rune that gives you a small chance to heal when you hit an enemy, or you didn't start with the spear that heals you slightly in between rounds, your health will be chipped away by the environments and monsters, sometimes rapidly and without any way to heal. Even the very skilled will run into situations where they may get bashed around by several charging enemies without the chance to recover.

Death in the game is permanent, although you carry over unlocked spears, characters with different base stats, and lore about monsters which can give you clues about their behaviour and how to defeat them. Each environment has its own monsters and simple, destructible obstacles the player has to negotiate. Killing a monster is a combination of reducing its health by throwing your unlimited spears at it, and using a harpoon, which charges up to three times for greater damage upon contact. In one of the game's signature features, if the harpooned body part of the monster is flashing red you can retract your harpoon and tear the part from the monster, debilitating and damaging it. Hooking on to a monster, especially a fast-moving one, can also help you keep up with it, although sometimes this is ill-advised since you may crash into it and take damage. Your ship is also equipped with a booster that allows you to move quickly forward to keep up with things or to dodge enemy attacks, though pressing the boost a split-second too long depletes the engines forcing a long recharge.

Sometimes the battle system can lead to some exhilarating moments, especially with bosses you aren't as familiar with. Finding new weak points and exploiting them while dodging projectiles and managing your one-use items and rune loadout can be intense, forcing you to do things like enter a creature's maw to take it out. It can't be understated how refreshing it is that the game demands precise aim, either: you need to hit that tiny little eyeball exactly to hit it, so when you pull off a manoeuvre (or a limb) you know that was all you. Searching for monsters to fight works well enough, as you're able to avoid or pursue most encounters through use of the sonar. There are times you may still run into the boss earlier than you want to, but generally it's a good system to exploit if you want to scrape together treasure or go straight for the round's end boss.

The loot in the game is the way your character increases in power. You collect credits from most enemies, which you can use in between rounds to buy a random selection of runes and one-use items, but most credits come from chests, which are unlocked with eager keys that spring involuntarily from your inventory, forcing you to play 52 card pickup unless you're right next to a chest when it opens. The RNG gods can also give you a rune selection that isn't that great, either for your playing style or the monsters you're going to face. Buying runes from the shop is a way to mitigate some of this, and over time you may be able to collect a decent selection. The early gameplay, though, can feel a bit thin as you're sticking tiny needles into yet another monster hoping it'll burp up a key, each of you chasing each other's tail for sometimes minutes, wrist straining, eyes blurry, pitying its poor, bleeding carcass. At the start it's nice to enter an arena wondering what sorts of runes you'll be able to find. Toward the end, as you're avoiding every attack for fear of losing your last few health, saddled with runes that don't quite get the job done against a boss you're not too fond of fighting, you'll wonder where all the effort went.

It is a relief that you can quit the game in between rounds rather than having to stick it out the whole way in one sitting, and that you can fully pause at any time during a round to switch runes and items (though this can lead to a rather tedious metagaming for those inclined to adapt to every situation with a different selection of runes). There are three game slots, so you can start a new game or continue with an older run, welcome in games of this kind. The permadeath feature can be demoralising, especially after your health was low for a long period of time without relief, but this should be familiar to players of similar games.

With randomised games like Blacksea Odyssey it comes down to the question of fun. There are moments of great entertainment as all the elements that lead up to this moment collide in monstrous screams, precise hits, torn limbs, and massive damage. This is deflated by the grinding for credits and gear, the caution required to preserve your health, the sometimes unkind randomness, the stingy vehicular booster system, the meagre starting position, and the level of twitch needed to succeed. Other than choosing different characters and spears there isn't much up to the player how to vary the game beyond the tactical character builds, and smart aiming and dodging. Exploration of the environment is basically for chests, for monsters, for the boss. Once you figure out how a monster behaves you may grow tired of them, especially those that are fiddly to take out, or the heavily armoured ones that that demand strict methodology to destroy. If none of these things sound like they detract from the first bit above, you're welcome to dive in.