After three years of no new video footage and hardly any updates, Amil Parra has released three new videos of the colorful, old-school first-person shooter RetroBlazer. It’s also now on Steam Greenlight.
Probably the first aspect of RetroBlazer that you’ll notice is its art style. It’s not often we see first-person shooters in bright pinks, purples, and apricots like this. Parra calls this look the “spiritual successor of Labyrinthia-style Raycasting and Vertex mapped games of the early 90s.” Yep, it’s inspired by the sprite-based shooters of the ‘90s and uses a distinct blend of 16bit and 32bit graphics, with a color palette to match.
In terms of character and world design, it’s set in the ruins of a once utopian world featuring heavily armored anthropomorphic enemies. In general, it’s like a techno-future Egypt, which is especially obvious upon seeing the designs of the Pyramid Guard and Enforcer Hound.
In terms of how it plays, RetroBlazer is made to be played fast, with plenty of flat environments to run through, and lots of enemies to shoot on the way through (or run past). Once again, the idea is to match old-school run-and-gunning shooters of the ‘90s, and it being made in the modified Quake engine DarkPlaces means it has an atomical connection to those shooters too.
Aside from that, the idea is to create intense battle scenes in which you need to dodge bullets to stay alive, as well as jump over lava, toxic pits and other environmental hazards. There’s also a little bit of puzzle solving to vary up the pace every now and then. To upgrade your weapons, you need to collect Relic Crystals to unlock new weapon forges at ARK chambers throughout levels.
There’s an alpha demo you can download from the game’s website. If you play it, you’ll probably want to customize the controls in the options to your preference. The plan is to have RetroBlazer finished and out for PC by the third quarter of 2016.
