Blast Off Far Away

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A decent high score game. I will keep it as a time killer and play it here and there. A much better fit for mobile market for sure but still I had fun.

Blast Off Far Away is a small but inventive space arcade game that takes a familiar survival-shooter foundation and gives it an unusual movement system. Developed by C405 and published by DigiPen Institute of Technology, it has the focused character of an experimental student project rather than a large commercial release. Its scope is modest, but the central concept is distinctive: the player's weapon is simultaneously a means of attacking enemies and propelling the astronaut through space. That simple twist shapes nearly every part of the experience and gives the game an identity beyond the standard arena shooter. The adventure follows an astronaut named TAYGAHLOO on a deliberately absurd mission involving Squid Coin and a trip to the moon. After things go badly and the spacecraft crashes, survival becomes the immediate concern. Hostile space squids threaten the stranded astronaut while oxygen steadily becomes a precious resource. The story is intentionally lighthearted and mostly exists to establish the strange setting. Rather than spending much time on dialogue or elaborate narrative development, the game quickly puts its mechanical ideas at the center of attention. Movement …

I began playing so as to attempt learning intuitively, and I might add that this is a strong yet overlooked compromise in setting difficulty, and consequentially not cramping such a small game by tutorializing the game before I play it. My experience of about a dozen blind attempts was so thoroughly engaging that I nearly forgot to open the "How To" section; admittedly I was also distracted by the charming access to the other menu windows via traveling in-game. After playing blind, I'm not so sure about the "How To's" insistence on using the boxes of debris for grappling; using the gun for movement and the grapple for emergencies was my emergent strategy, and I thought that the boxes were static obstacles that I was meant to destroy or avoid. The game has primary and secondary bases of mechs: the mazer and spotter respectively. The perpendicular texturing of these two mechanical processes is the well-carved path to greatness for many classic Nerve games. In a constantly expanding arena I would slightly prefer quantity over quality, since anything with a unique modifier is ideally just defeated from a distance before I figure out what it does. On the other hand, situations where my…

its free

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