Review: Core Blaster (PlayStation minis)

15 Jan, 2011

Title Core Blaster
Platform PS3/PSP via PlayStation Store minis
Developer Ringzero Game Studio
Released December 15th 2010
Price £2.49

Since the launch of PlayStation minis in 2009, the PlayStation Store has, like the Xbox Live Arcade before it, become a springboard for hundreds of hugely talented indie game developers and their games including BigBen Interactive, Immersive Games and the clever sods behind Jen’s latest review title Raskulls, Halfbrick Studios.

Keeping me busy this weekend is Ringzero Game Studio’s futuristic defence strategy game Core Blaster. A mishmash of PSP puzzler Lumines and Q-Games’ own downloadable tower defence game PixelJunk Monsters, Core Blaster is a vivid, addictive and devilishly difficult game not designed for those with a tendency to angrily fling controllers in the general direction of expensive ceramics. This is why I decided against having ornaments in my living room.

Core Blaster’s premise is very simple. Little balls of energy called ‘cores’ travel along a network of lines on a grid in various – and often random – directions. The player is in possession of ‘blasters’ which must be strategically placed at certain points on the grid in order to destroy the cores before they can damage the ‘gate’ at the end of the line. Simple enough, until the waves of cores start travelling at higher speeds. Blasters can only destroy one core at a time, meaning a few will begin to slip through the net, speeding forth towards the gate. To make matters worse, cores come in all manner of different colours and only the corresponding colour blaster will be able to destroy them. It’s at this point things begin to get upsettingly complex.

Each core destroyed nets you cash to buy additional blasters, but they don’t come cheap. Even at the Beginner difficulty level, you will find yourself frantically selling one blaster to afford one of a different colour to take out the next wave, before selling that one to buy one of the colour you had before. If you can afford it, of course, which nine times out of ten you can’t and you’re forced to watch helplessly as the gate is mercilessly destroyed by a cavalcade of little glowing menaces.

Technically Core Blaster is pretty solid. The game looks nice, with an effective use of colours and explosion effects that reminded me of PlayStation 2 launch title FantaVision, a tech demo turned extravagant puzzler hiding beneath the glittering exterior of a fabulous fireworks display. Soundtracks have always played a surprisingly big part in puzzle games, since the days of Tetris and Columns, but Core Blaster’s music is cheesy at best, letting the game down ever so slightly.

All in all, Core Blaster is a slick little puzzler not for the faint-hearted, especially when going for those elusive A-Rank scores. For connoisseurs of the genre however, I highly recommend this impressive addition to a roster of genuinely brilliant indie games.