I don’t understand Blender Bros. I don’t mean that I don’t understand it as a game, rather, just why the game was released on Steam in the state that it is. You see, Blender Bros drew me in with the odd-looking visuals that made me initially think this was one of the retro-inspired titles. Just to be clear: it isn’t. Instead, the game is a rerelease of an old Game Boy Advance title originally developed by Hudson Soft.
What’s astonishing is that nothing seems to have been done to the title to bring it up to 2020 standards and warrant the price tag. This is not a remake of the original, or even a remaster with crisper visuals. It is the exact same game from the GBA and I can’t find much reason for its existence in 2020. Sure, you get the odd modernization, but it is the very bare minimum with some stretching and that terrible TV scanline filter no one ever uses.
You can stretch the screen to fit your monitor if you hate yourself that much, and you got some save options to play with too. Look, when you can fire up the same game in a GBA emulator and get a lot more features than in this $11 release, you aren’t really doing fans any favors. Heck, I’m totally new to this series and I found the experience of playing it on an emulator a much more enjoyable one.
What’s really strange is that Blender Bros isn’t even some sort of hidden gem or classic title for the GBA. Reviews back in 2002 gave it middling scores and the points against it are only even more apparent and damning today. Reviewers called Blender Bros a short affair that might have worked okay on a portable in the car, but behind a PC you can finish the game in a single sitting, feeling left mostly empty at the end and not wanting to go back.
Getting into the game itself, you play as Blender, this sort of bunny/cat type thing and you go from level to level defeating other animal bosses and strange-looking Japanese enemies. The story is really basic and not presented very well so I never really knew what I was doing. Heck, for the longest chunk of the game I thought I was the bad guy, and even after beating it I’m not sure I wasn’t playing the villain. I won’t spoil it but it has something to do with some animal who had human friends but then didn’t and humans are mentioned but never show up and, you know, I not actually clear still on the story.
Visually everything looks chunky and pixelated, but not in the pretty way people imagine when you talk pixel art. There are lots of GBA games out there that feature some great art and 2D sprites but when you start blowing up sprites designed for a tiny screen things simply get muddy, especially when they are that pseudo-3D sprites the GBA loved. Makes everything look like a weird claymation sort of thing. Again, why on earth wasn’t this a remaster with cleaned up sprites or totally redrawn graphics in the vein of something like Shantae. Blender Bros really feels like a game released as a project to see how little work a publisher can do to make a few dollars.
Gameplay is where a platformer like this lives and dies, and Blender Bros gets it mostly right, but only after adjusting to its “unique” style. And by unique I mean strangely complicated and not intuitive. Nothing is explained plainly to the player and so you’ll sort of just wing it as best you can at times. See, you can jump on your ears for an extra boost if you hold the down arrow while in the air, something I had to figure out early on as I had no idea how to reach a ledge above me. The thing is, this jumping also feels very inconsistent which is not something you want when precision platforming is required. Basic jumping is also a bit wonk and you’ll be making jumps multiple times to hit ledges.
Upon my second playthrough of the game, I noticed that you can attack enemies with a sort of drill attack. I beat the entire game without knowing how to do this or even that I could and when it randomly happened I never quite knew how I pulled it off. As you might imagine then, Blender Bros isn’t a terribly hard game if one can ignore a core mechanic and still get by without too much issue. Basic attacking is fine and you’ll make do with whipping your ears about without basic enemies causing you any sort of trouble.
The main hook of Blender Bros is, well, the bros that you collect throughout the adventure. Before each stage, you select a mini-bro which acts as an ability for you during play. One might extend your attack range, the other a temporary shield, a light for dark areas, and so on. It’s the best feature of the game and incentivizes you you explore the areas in each stage. You can also weirdly upgrade mini-bros using music CDs you can buy at the stop but I never understood how this worked. But the real problem is that I never actively went looking for mini-bros in my first playthrough and managed just fine with the few I stumbled upon.
At one point in the game, I found a bro that recharged my heath and since stages tend to be really short, I was essentially invincible. I could take a few hits in the trickier areas and then simply back off and let my bro recharge, which in turn would then recharge me. And while this tactic makes the platforming easy, if a little long in the tooth, another bro which acts like a shied made boss battles mostly a joke.
Blender Bros features a number of bosses that serve to challenge the player and tend to do a good job of it. The problem is that the skills needed to beat them are never really explored in the standard levels. This means you’ll be dying trying to memorize patterns that leave little room for error. Bosses have lots of health and can move quickly about the screen. You’ll almost never be able to jump over them as your big jump requires too many frames to get going. It was only when I got the shield bro did I stand a good chance against the later bosses.
Remember, Blender Bros was designed for the cramped screen of the GBA which really limits the play-field. Even on a huge monitor, everything feels cramped and while stages can get away with this thanks to cool tricks like using depth to shift about in stages and verticality, boss battles don’t get that luxury. They are hard for the sake of being hard, and you could get away with that back in the day of a cramped screen. Look, we used to cut a lot of breaks to handheld gaming in the early 2000s that we just don’t today. This is why portable games get remakes (Metroid 2) and not re-releases just as they were.
The stages that you play through are a mixed bag. Most are incredibly short with many taking well under five minutes to complete. Sure, you can explore them to find new mini-bros but I never felt bothered. Good game design should encourage the player or naturally feed them into certain paths to explore, but that never really happens here. In many respects, Blender Bros’ levels feel like an old-school Euro-platformer, the kind that featured huge stages but which you could blow through without seeing most of it.
And there are more than the traditional platforming stages as the game loves to throw these F-Zero inspired racing stages that we used to see all the time on the SNES thanks to Mode 7. These are mostly harmless and do help break up the game but they come with unique problems that will confuse every single player that experiences them. As a famous YouTuber like to say, “It’s a where the fuck do I go” sort of game. These stages are built like races with you behind the wheel but in reality, they are anything but. You actually just collect some stuff however you want and then slam into a machine to win.
The problem is that tracks are linear and not a closed circuit, and on top of this they are all timed. So here I am missing a pickup think that I think I would simply get it on the next run of the track when there wasn’t one. The game does a really bad job of explaining this because if you do turn around at any point to grab something you miss a huge “Wrong Way” sign will flash just like in a racing game telling you you are doing something wrong. There is even a stage that requires you to backtrack to reach the end but the game will still flash “Wrong Way” in your face. Why on earth would you not fix this bug in a release? Unless, of course, this game is just a cheap cash-grab.
It’s little things like these that really keep Blender Bros from being nothing more than some throwaway GBA title, and with nothing special being added to this release I’ll go back to my thoughts about this one being nothing but a quick cash-grab to make some money for another project the publisher is working on. The very bare minimum of something like this should at least be better than playing it free on an emulator which it simply isn’t. It ends up feeling like you just paid to play a rom file and nothing more.
“Blender Bros was a middling GBA platformer in 2002, and the issues it had then are only highlighted in this needless and bare-bones re-release that does the game zero justice.”
Final Score
Blender Bros
Piko Interactive
PLATFORM: Steam
GENRE: Platformer
RELEASE DATE: Aug 25, 2020
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