Blue Estate
For fans of the old school, on-rails shooter, Blue Estate sounds like it has the potential to quench a mighty thirst and this port to Xbox One, utilising the machines’ Kinect peripheral, should have been the icing on the cake. Instead, He-Saw’s game, based on Viktor Kalvachev’s graphic novels, is a lukewarm evening of entertainment and a curious oddity of a video game that, whilst not without its plus points, feels a little out of time and place.
Like R Kelly, it’s difficult to figure out if Blue Estate is in on the joke or completely oblivious to its ridiculousness. We’d wager it’s the former, such is the amount of knowing, intertextual jokes and gags it throws at the player. However, it never seems to take that awareness and convert it into a convincing, cheeky wink. Had the writers managed to elicit a few more laughs instead of grimaces and moans, then perhaps more would have been forgiven.
Yet to get offended by Blue Estate is to do it a service it hasn’t earned. Its goofy, knockabout tale of mafia bosses and femme fatales often comes across like a twelve-year-old trying to show off and get your attention, never quite understanding what it’s saying but knowing it maybe shouldn’t be saying it all the same. That’s not to make a case for censorship of any kind, more a script rethink and a call for some self-restraint if the game wants to appeal to anyone who is legally able to drink.
Whether this is all a product of the source material we can’t comment but even with that it would still be possible to have a mechanically sound game tagged in there. In that, Blue Estate is more successful and though it adds nothing particularly new to the genre, and has been done better by everything from Virtua Cop to Ghost Squad, it’s still a serviceable enough title that’s perhaps elevated by the relative drought of current similar games.
Though the use of Kinect could have saved some face, its implementation is less than fantastic. Making a gun shape with your right hand is intuitive enough but there’s no trigger function, meaning shots are fired as soon as your cross-hair makes contact with a foe. With a joypad it’s possible to make subtle, micro-second alterations before firing, meaning a potential shoulder ricochet can be turned into a popping head shot. With no such finesse via Kinect, Blue Estate becomes that little more bog standard and less appealing.
Yet with a joypad in hand it’s difficult to wholly rule out Blue Estate as a bit of whimsy for an hour or two. Its running time isn’t much longer than even that, so at the very least it doesn’t outstay its welcome. However, even at its budget price point it would be stretching it to recommend beyond those parameters. As we said, Blue Estate is a curious artefact, but one that’s perhaps best left on the shelf.