If you played Wolfenstein 3D or Doom, Retro Blazer may bring you a wave of nostalgia as you are playing through its 7 levels. The game has beautiful 2D sprites in a 3D world with 32-bit color and the music in the background lends itself to the game’s fast pace.
The plot, not that it really matters, goes something like this…
In the vast labyrinth of ARK Island, once elder now Tyrannical Warlord, Lokahndril, has used the island’s ancient mainframe entity to create his own army of corrupt androids. R-Blazer, the only survivor of the invasion, infiltrates the labyrinth and uses his foe’s own weapons against them!
Battle through the different military installations and vast ruins, all with their own unique enemies, weapons and items. Collect items to power up your abilities to make yourself stronger and more powerful, only then can you put and end to the Warlord’s hunger for power!
By default, the game controls come configured to use a mix of the keyboard and mouse. The first change I had to make to the controls was setting the left/right arrow keys to strafe instead of rotate. I am still working on finding the control scheme that works best for me but the game has been fun and intrigues me to play more even as I work to optimize the controls.
The game is currently free in its fully-playable alpha version. You can download it from www.retroblazer.com. It comes as portable, zipped file at 70.5MB. The download includes the Darkplaces Engine that the game uses and enables it to work across Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms. It launches by just running the Darkplaces.exe or Darkplaces-SDL.exe files.
The development team stated that it is currently too far out to decide whether the game will become commercial when finalized or will remain free. If so, the project lead stated that the Steam platform is favorable and mobile platforms may be a possibility with a new engine.