I beat Blade Force on the 3DO!
Blade Force is a 3D flight combat game. The premise is simple: 2100 Los Angeles is a shithole and when a scientist tries to pitch a weaponized helicopter suit to the outgunned police, his lab gets firebombed for his troubles. You’re the lucky vigilante he hired to get revenge against the people who put him in his wheelchair, and you’re gonna do that by exploring six open 3D levels and destroying the stage bosses.
Blade Force was heavily marketed in the waning days of the 3DO as the system’s big technical showcase and in that respect, mission accomplished. The levels are big and open, and the game chugs at a fairly steady 24 FPS, even reaching 60 fps when you stare at walls. It compares favourably to PS1 and Saturn games released that year. There are some heavy compromises to achieve that though: there’s aggressive LOD-ing paired with a short draw distance and your enemies don’t look much like of anything beside simple geometrical shapes. Stage bosses are just rotating rectangles with a picture of the character’s face on them.
Blade Force does some neat and unique things. It’s a flight combat shooter where you need to reach the stage boss. The levels are large and open and while you can beeline straight to the boss, you’re encouraged to explore the levels to collect both power-ups and “sources” (rotating cubes with a nuclear symbol) that lower the global enemy strength in various ways. These power-ups come in the expected (health, fuel, shields, keys to open up sections of the levels) but perhaps your biggest currency are the energy pick-ups that reload the recharge speed of your second weapon. There are anywhere from 100 to 200 of those scattered around the maps and while the effect of picking up one at a time won’t be noticeable, it quickly stack up and you’ll soon understand the importance of collecting as many of these as possible to be able to take advantage of your more powerful weapons and clear the levels more efficiently.
The flow becomes clear: replay the levels until you find the best path to collect the energy pick-ups in a safe manner, then find a power weapon to leverage your newfound juice and use that to assault enemy outputs and collect the sources to make the rest of the level easier. It’s an odd comparison, but playing it reminded of Compile shoot’em ups and how these games give you 500 ways to make your player character stronger.
Presentation-wise, the game blow its wad early. The game starts with a crazy and entertaining FMV intro, but every cutscenes after that are short and infrequent, often lasting less than 30 seconds. The ending stands out as especially half-assed - it’s just a montage of the end-of-level cutscenes, and you get almost the same cutscene if you run out of live and game over! I’m not asking for Blade Force : The Musical but just something like voice acting during the missions would’ve helped.
That slight feel of being unfinished extends in other areas. I suspect some levels aren’t 100% explorable as intended, because some of the “Key” items that open up sections don’t have a hitbox and can’t be destroyed. A common issue with designing flight combat games is that the very nature of flight makes it easy to escape or just ignore encounters. To “force” combat, the designers of Blade Force made it so that certain type of enemies either suck you in or push you back. It’s not conveyed in the visual and combine that with the heavy pop-in and you’ll get in situations when you’re moving in the level, only to suddenly get stuck between enemies and get pinballed around with no chance of escaping. The game has no mercy invincibility even after losing a life, so there are times where I’d lose three straights life in a row because I was stuck in an unwinnable situation. It doesn’t feel great!
Blade Force is a good game that could’ve been amazing. If not for a sequel, it could’ve really used some later release to smooth out its rough edges and improve the presentation. Supposedly a PC port was planned, but the contracted developer found it a waste of their talent and turned it into a mediocre Descent clone instead. A shame, because this is a game that deserved better.
