Perpetual Blast (Wii U) Review

If there's a serious disease in today's gaming industry, it is the excessive presence of tutorials and hand-holding. In the first moment, that's not the case with Perpetual Blast, which just throws the player into space and hopes that they figure it out. The task is not a difficult one: the player's in a space ship, in the middle of a 3D space environment, and there're many boxes floating around. Of course, the player will start to shoot them.

But then, problems start to show up; the controls are counter-intuitive and a lot of buttons do things that won't immediately be understood. Nonetheless, the pause screen solves part of the problem, explaining everything that has to be known: how to switch from normal to gyro controls, how to fire missiles, etc. The controls remain counter-intuitive, though (for example, why does it have to switch between normal and gyro controls and doesn't have both, like Splatoon's control scheme?), but with time and a little practice, they will be gotten used to.

Nevertheless, Perpetual Blast's biggest problems aren't its controls, but its gameplay, and that's due to how barebones it is. The entire game is about shooting one hundred floating boxes, like you were a space garbage-cleaner, again and again through ten stages. The only changing between stages will be the presentation, which, in any case, isn't that great: average electronic music and below-average graphics.

The only remarkable gameplay feature is the well-implemented inertia physics of the space ship, which does give the feeling of being in space. However, the absolute absence of new tweaks and mechanics is so brutal that, sooner than later, it becomes boring doing these tedious tasks, which gives a job feeling, instead of a fun, challenging feeling.

To sum up, Perpetual Blast is a lacklustre experience so repetitive and unsurprising that it brings it closer to a tech demo than an actual game. The lack of endings or any reward through the stages, plus the incredibly (but, in the end, thankfully) short length of the game, makes this a sad waste of time.