Rating: ★★★☆☆
Playtime: 22 Hours
Platform: Nintendo 64 (Played on Xbox Series X)
Duration: 8/13/20225 - 7/21/2025
TL;DR
Blast Corps is one of those games that takes a golden concept, walks halfway to the finish line with it, and tripped about three times getting there. The catharsis of just smashing buildings to bits is a fantastic and fun core, but the game has a handful of problems, some from the hardware limitations, and some from the design of the game itself.
REVIEW
Blast Corps | Rare
I REALLY want to like Blast Corps. There's something in me (and likely most people) that just loves a game where the whole bit is just running around and smashing buildings and objects to bits (or incorporating them into yourself a-la Katamari Damacy - you get the idea). Unfortunately, this game has a lot of flaws that hold it back from the pure fun that a game like this could bring.
At its core, you're playing as a variety of vehicles to clear the path for a nuclear warhead-carrying truck along a predetermined path. You can use these vehicles to smash buildings and objects, patch up holes in the path, or to maneuver certain machines and paths to help create a clear shot for the truck. I really enjoy this as a gameplay loop - you need some sort of structure and narrative to tie the mindless destruction into a game loop with a win condition. Makes a ton of sense. A lot of levels where you do this are really fun - but the problem is that how easy the level is becomes entirely based on which vehicle you're forced into - with one notable stinker in the bunch.
THE VEHICLES (BACKLASH SPECIFICALLY)
The Backlash... Blast Corps | Rare
The Backlash is one of the worst controlling things I have ever had to control in a video game. The premise is simple - a big dump truck who's mighty rear you swing into buildings to level them. It is unfortunately not that simple in practice. You have very limited control over the direction of this swing. It's not none - you can do something with it, but I wasn't able to figure out the 'rules for the road' with this one for my entire playtime. For most of the game I didn't actually know you could manually enter the 'back swinging mode' by using the bumpers, which helped once I learned, but even then I had to make at least a dozen attempts on most of the Backlash stages to get the gold medals.
The rest of the vehicles aren't nearly as bad - the bulldozer is fun and simple, there's an annoying tricycle that shoots finicky bullets, you get a few racecars for the racing bonus stages, there's this strange one that has you extend two pistons from each side to do damage, and a go-kart with a fun boost. Overall not too bad for any of these - you also get the chance to situationaly control boats and trains, but these are confined to certain areas. The real good stuff comes with the three mech - suits you get to pilot - these are super fun to control and make you feel like a kaiju mauling down a village - good stuff.
This game also suffers from very spotty collision detection. I had a lot of runs die whenever my vehicle would get stuck on a corner that it clearly was not visibly touching. Any situation where you have to push an object is also a nightmare, you can tell that they had to approximate how physics work to get the game running. This in particular makes some of the most challenging stages a pain in the neck.
OYSTER HARBOR IS ON MY LIST
Oyster Harbor Playthrough | randomChievos
The worst of these stages, by far, is the final level: Oyster Harbor. A five minute (at least) gauntlet where enough wrong moves culminate in so much time lost that there's no way you can win. The level has this intricate pathway where the nuke truck has to cross over three gaps with boats you've moved, with one of these boats (the FIRST ONE) also being needed to go across the map and grab a TNT block to blow up the last building. There's no good time to take this boat to get the TNT. You try it before the truck crosses it and boom the truck falls in the water, and if you try it after the truck crosses you barely have enough time to get the TNT to the last building, lest you succumb to the masterful 'pushing object' jank this game is smeared in. It's a challenge much above the rest of what this game asks, but it's a brutal final challenge and reflective of the game's disregard for its own jank.
When the game isn't making you cry it has a ton of extra content in the bonus missions that you can unlock from the main stages. Many of these are time trials or race courses which change up the way the game plays and are a good break from pace. More content comes from the opportunity to explore previous stages without the nuke truck, giving you a chance to level the whole map and find collectables (you will need to do this for every map to get 100%). Once you've done this you get the chance to explore space for some more entertaining bonus stages with low gravity, which I'd say is a pretty fair completion award. After ALL of this you unlock the ability to do time trials in the main stages, which are surprisingly easier than clearing them the first time, although not substantially. I can, at least, proudly boast that I have the highest rank time trial medal for the previously discussed Oyster Harbor.
Overall, I really like the gameplay loop on display here, it just has some massive aspects holding it down, that perhaps could be ironed out in a sequel (if Microsoft ever remembered that Rare exists instead of laying off 9000 people and cancelling Everwild and Perfect Dark).
AESTHETICS
The Backlash... Blast Corps | Rare
Visually, it's an N64 game, it looks super low-poly, but playing in Rare Replay gets the game up to a higher resolution which looks quite nice. The biggest issue is the textures are quite muddy and blurry, which can sometimes make your targets hard to spot or interpret, but overall it gets the job done.
From an audio perspective though - they absolutely cooked with this one. This soundtrack is laced with banger upon banger that are super dated and of their era, but they just sound so good. There's also brief quips from some side characters that add sonically to the game's personality, and are also realistic radio conversations that you'd have with your dispatcher and the truck driver (... I think). I'd definitely recommend giving it a brief listen, but I'd say it's much better in the context of the game than on its own, not really built for a full listen.
As it stacks up to the rest of Rare Replay as I've been going through it, the challenges and achievements are fair, and the game is ported smoothly and without any notable issues to my eyes. The game is a massive step up from anything else that we've seen so far in the bundle, with Rare's absence from the SNES era in this collection due to Nintendo's involvement making the gap seem massive here. I'm excited to get into some of these iconic Rare games coming up!
Blast Corps is a good game that's obfuscated by some poor choices and some technical limitations, but there's a lot of fun to be had here, and a lot of creativity and effort on display, so I'd recommend giving the game a shot. If you're not a completionist though I'd recommend stopping after the medium levels for your own sanity's sake.
Bringing the boom until next time - Mikey