Blink: Rogues Review

Blink: Rogues is a top-down shooter from developer Fox Dive Studios that aims to bring a chaotic twist to the genre with the addition of two lanes instead of one. It may seem simple at first glance, but it takes a lot of patience to get Blink: Rogues right.

The story for Blink: Rogues is rather generic and is told entirely through easily missable text-based dialogue delivered at the start of each mission, but you wouldn’t be missing much if you did ignore it. You play as Lucas Ahalla who is – of course – one of the best pilots around as you get a call from Tanya Blaze, a recruiter from a space army named VOID HQ, asking for help on a few missions. After initially refusing, Tanya sends you pictures of your brother and she will only reveal what she knows if you help. If you have seen a similar plot in the past, you’ll most likely see where it’s going early on and because of that you never really gain interest in it. It doesn’t help that the writing is poor as well with cringy dating app jokes and such, but the story isn’t really the focus for this game.

Blink: Rogues is unique when it comes to other top-down shooters because of its dual-lane which essentially splits the screen in half and hits you with enemies in both lanes. It adds an extra level of challenge that almost makes it feel impossible at first, but as you go through the story and unlock more upgrades, you’ll start to see the flow of how you should be tackling levels. The ability to teleport between each lane is known as ‘blink’ and all upgrades you receive change how you blink to each lane. For example, you could have the double damage ability applied on one lane and invulnerability in the other so each time you blink to the respective lane, that ability will activate (as long as the timer for each ability resets as well). You apply which ability you want at the beginning of each level. There is a strategy to blinking since you will appear in the exact spot in the other lane, so you can easily kill yourself by blinking into enemy fire or right on top of a ship if you blink too hastily.

The goal for each level is to get at least one star, with the stars based on the percentage of how many enemies you've taken out. It usually goes: one star is 50% enemies taken out, two stars is 75% and three stars is 100%. Getting three stars is nearly impossible on the first run because you will never know where enemies will be initially, but if you’re determined, you can replay the level and learn the patterns to make sure you get them all.

While the controls feel good, they can be confusing when first picking up the controller. It also doesn’t help that the tutorial is rather short and generally unhelpful, you only start to pick it up by continuously failing in the beginning levels. Your ship auto-fires at all times, but you also have three other weapons on X, Y and B that shoot orange, red and purple projectiles that will take out the enemy with the matching coloured shield. These other weapons have ammo as well, but the enemies drop so much restock ammo that running out was never an issue. Learning and memorising each colour to each button was challenging early on since they basically throw you into the game, but the game flows better once you do.

Blink: Rogues also has multiplayer, whether it be PvP or co-op via the story and it can be quite fun… for a couple of hours. Co-op is just playing the story with a friend which makes it vastly easier to get three stars. PvP sets each player in one of the two lanes with the goal to kill as many enemies as you can while trying to take out the other player. At first, the PvP mode was entertaining because of how chaotic it was to try and fight all the enemies while trying to dodge another player who is trying to kill you as well. But that lasted about a few rounds until you realise that as long as you stayed at the bottom of the screen, you’ll likely come out on top.

Visually, Blink: Rogues is nothing fancy. The terrain under the ship as you’re fighting all these enemies is just polygons of what is supposed to be land and water. The shadows for all the ships are really defined as well and because of that, it makes it difficult to distinguish from the actual ships flying around sometimes. While the game itself ran great, every time I opened it on Steam it would also open SteamVR and the Oculus store app even though there is no VR available for the game. Closing SteamVR would close the game as well and I wasn’t sure how to stop this from happening, so I had to keep Steam VR open while playing.

Blink: Rogues is a top-down shooter that tries – and generally succeeds – at doing something unique with the genre. The blinking feature is challenging and can be irritating in the beginning, but becomes fun when you begin to learn the flow and multiplayer could be enjoyable for only a couple of hours as well. But if you’re here for a great story and long hours of gameplay, I’d blink in the other direction.