As a puzzler, Block & Shot is fine. It’s decent enough as a little throwaway title that can be completed in an evening, too. But premise wise? We’re not going to beat it down for that either, but we would love to know who the hell thought that playing as an interchangeable gun, searching out a special golden cartridge case could work as the backbone of a game? Where on earth did that idea come from?
We guess someone at 17Studio will have all the answers, but to give them their due, it matters little, for they’ve managed to create a rather neat, yet non-taxing puzzle game. It’s a game that we’ve had a little bit of fun with for an evening. It’s just that we just can’t get over the why.
Block & Shot is about as simple a puzzler as you are going to get. Taking on the role of a gun (yes, a gun), it’s up to you to navigate your way through a number of small stages, traversing the pathways in hope of stumbling upon your end goal – the holy golden cartridge case. Only then will you be thrust into a new test of the mind, and then another, and another, all before Block & Shot runs out of ideas and you get to uninstall the game from your hard drive, to be forgotten forevermore.
Each stage is a relatively small affair, isometric in viewpoint, a camera attached to one thumbstick so you can swing this way and that, the other dictating the positioning of your little gun. That camera movement is helpful too, as it lets you plan your route ahead, as you move from one tile to the next, hopping up levels, down platforms, and past obstacles as best you can. We would however have loved to have had more control of the camera, as the simple left and right movements allowed are sometimes limited. Surely a push up, or pull down, on the stick, or even some kind of zoom in or out, wouldn’t have been too troublesome to implement?
Whatever, the levels in Block & Shot are easy enough to navigate, occasionally requiring some form of hit and hope, as you check out potential routes and plan ahead. You see, there are multiple limitations that add to the puzzling nature of Block & Shot, all coming together to ensure that this isn’t a walk in the park.
For a start, you play as a gun, and guns have no legs. Instead they fire a shot, the recoil propelling them in the direction the gun handle is pointing, the blast forcing them away from the tile they are on, occasionally smashing the most delicate of blocks to smithereens. The humble revolver here has just enough power to shift from one tile to another on a north, south, east and west axis, whilst a colt (we think it’s a colt and that’s what we’re going with), twists things by working on the diagonals. The shotgun is a bit beefier, pushing forward by two tiles at a time; something that is brilliant for jumping gaps in any pathway. And then there’s a humble little water pistol – capable of moving one square, or powering up to hop to the next, two tiles on.
Each gun comes with a severely limited ammo supply, so working out routes to pick up scattered ammo pick-ups is a requirement throughout Block & Shot. And switching from one gun to another can only be done by landing on certain coloured tiles. If you think you can see a route forward, but need that shotgun to help you do so, you’ll need to land on a specifically coloured ‘shotgun’ tile first. It’s that constant juggling of ammo, gun switching, the odd button press and obstacle navigation (exploding barrels and bottomless pits of doom, mostly) that brings some tactical needs to the game.
However, rarely will you ever find yourself stuck in Block & Shot. With a swift respawn possible, and levels short in nature, sometimes over in a few seconds and a handful of moves, any mistake is soon forgotten, as you get to try new methods of attack, working out the best way to reach that end-goal golden cartridge case. In fact, with 60 or so levels in place, you’ll have rinsed everything that Block & Shot has to offer, and picked up every single one of the 1000 Gamerscore in place, within about 90 minutes or so. We only came a cropper on one level; a latter stage that had us stumped for about ten minutes. The rest? Over as swiftly as they popped onto the screen.
The problem Block & Shot has is that it is just too easy to steer clear of trouble, and mostly there’s only really one way to solve a stage. And the answer you are looking for is usually so seemingly straightforward that rarely will you need to switch the brain into gear. That’s a shame, because whilst this is far from a visual treat, and you’ll switch the audio off within an instant, we’d have loved to have spent a bit more time blasting our way across additional stages, especially if they were able to up the ante a bit and provide more of a test. Instead, Block & Shot just ends as you complete the final level, literally failing to provide anything more.
As it is, Block & Shot is fine. A fine puzzler, a fine giver of easy Gamerscore and a fine way of spending a sole evening of gaming. But it could have been more than fine. It could – and should – have been something more testing, delivering on the explosive premise, building on the simple puzzling mechanics.
Block & Shot: A Unique Puzzle Shooter Takes Aim at Xbox – https://www.thexboxhub.com/block-shot-a-unique-puzzle-shooter-takes-aim-at-xbox/
Buy Block & Shot on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/p/9P1PTG8N0N6P/0010
