Q-YO Blaster [Xbox]
Developed by Team Robot Black Hat and published by Forever Entertainment, Q-YO Blaster is an arcade shmup that sees an asteroid heading for Earth, bringing with it a disastrous plague of bugs. Able to be played as single player or 2 player co-op, you can choose between Classic and Arcade Extreme modes; with a choice of three “teams” that will give you different special powers to utilise in battle and a different selection of characters to choose from.
The story is the same regardless of which team and/or character you choose, which is a little disappointing. You’ll face off against progressively more challenging enemies, with them being unbelievable bullet-sponges within the Arcade Extreme mode. You’ve got a standard weapon, but the floating pickups are the real MVPs, with temporary alterations to ammo type, including some very useful Homing Missiles and laser weapons that will do a lot more damage. Other pickups include speed increases as well as Support Drones that will accompany you, providing further help against your enemies. You can use a Pulse blast to clear the screen of all bullets, turning them into gems for you to collect, and this is very useful for when things get a bit too hectic, and collecting a certain number of gems will gain you additional lives. Even for someone who is skilled at arcade shooters and bullet-hell type games (Allan, definitely not me!) it can get mighty overwhelming, and you’ll find that one death can quickly progress into 2, then 5 in a matter of a few infuriating minutes.
You can upgrade your power between levels, from choices such as increasing your speed, extra ammo and gaining an extra life. Running out of lives will prompt a “Continue?” screen, with an optional point penalty to continue, so having extra lives at your disposal will help to hold off on that! Playing Arcade Extreme mode also opens up a wider selection of Power Upgrades between levels, with both modes having previously selected options greyed out upon reaching the screen again (with some exceptions).
Level designs are interesting, with environments ranging from within a house, to moving up and alongside destroyed buildings and through forests. Playing in Arcade Extreme mode gives the levels a slightly different hue to the Classic mode, and also provides additional bosses that you’ll have to take on. Character designs, from the available playable characters, to the enemies and bosses are well varied and look fantastic. The soundtrack is really catchy, with enjoyable synthwave tunes by Miguel Vazquez that worked great within the levels - and even just to listen to outwith the game!
The story is fairly vague, and the short comic styled story segments don’t really add anything much to the game, and whilst they can be quite nice to look at, the dialogue has frequent spelling and grammatical errors, as well as issues with some characters names seemingly changing between screens.
There’s a lot of confusing and/or frustrating things about the game, including a problem with the final boss that led it to constantly move forward into us, leaving you no space to avoid getting contact damage from it unless you flew round past it, but then you’re stuck, unable to shoot it as you perpetually face right, and the boss was now on the left. Dying also then just plopped you right on top of the boss, so as soon as the temporary invincibility from respawning wore off, you’d take damage yet again. Luckily this only happened right towards the end of the game, so with a continue or two, we were still able to defeat them. There’s also an issue in the tutorial segment - which takes place every time you start the game with a new character - it states to press Y to utilise your Pulse, but will actually only work by pressing X. It seems to be describing the controls for the Switch version, which is a little frustrating as the Xbox version was released over two years later, so you’d think they’d have updated this!
Q-YO Blaster is a fun little game that will give you an hour or so of playtime to get through the story once, with plenty of replayability if you want to go back and play as the other characters. My one wish is that there had been more of a difference between the characters, as while they each have different appearances, visually different standard ammo, and one of three available special attacks, these are all so minor that it would have been good to have some variety in storylines. We still enjoyed our time with it - Allan more so than I, as I’m just not as quick when it comes to these types of game - and find that it’s probably best suited for people who love a good bullet hell game. If you’re interested in Q-YO Blaster, you can pick it up for £8.39 on the Xbox Store.
In the end, we decided to give Q-YO Blaster the Collecting Asylum rating of 6.5/10.
Have you played Q-YO Blaster yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Forever Entertainment for the Q-YO Blaster Xbox review code!
