“Cherry Popz” – Yes she does

Blue Estate is a game for the PS4 that is told through the narration of an inept private detective. You play as either Tony or Clarence. Tony is the son of a mob boss who starts a war with a rival gang after they kidnap his girl, Cherry Popz.  This leads to Tony’s father’s horse “Blue Estate” to get taken ransom. Joining the fight is Clarence who is an ex Navy SEAL. The game is ridiculously funny and it instantly reminded me of my childhood where there used to be these places called “arcades.” It’s very similar to those arcade light gun shooting on-rail games, but on the PS4, the action is amped up. It has a beautiful art style as you would expect with this being a prequel to the Victor Kalvachev comic book series of the same name. The game can  also be played solo or in a local coop mode with a friend.

  Blue Estate – The Game – PS4 [Digital Code]

I took the HeSaw developed game “Blue Estate” for an on-rails test drive through all 7 levels of pure fun and enjoyment wondering why this isn’t a more widely played game. Then it hit me. There’s several things about this game that will instantly turn people off.  The first is the unique brand of humor. If you are easily offended, this game wasn’t made for you. I found the humor to fit in nicely with the action and art style. If you are able to take a joke, you will enjoy the humor immensely.  Never take this game seriously. During the early stages of the PS4 life-cycle, this is hands down the funniest game available. The second thing that probably scares away gamers was the fact that it’s on-rails.

Entire Playthrough on Youtube

Being an rail shooter means that you don’t control your character movements — at all. You are swiftly taken from area to area and your task is to eliminate all the bad guys before the game takes you to the next area. There is no shortage of bad guys to shoot. While most shooter fans will instantly go for the traditional head shot (which is the fastest way to kill someone…obviously) and score extra points, you can also score extra points for nutshots. No explanation needed for that one. It won’t take long before you’re forgetting that this is an on-rail shooter. The action, the dialogue and the beautifully rendered graphics  will make sure of that. Honestly, being a rail shooter makes this a better game.

Bachelor party at the golf Course

The final reason some people might stay away was the fact that it uses motion control. People often hear “motion control” and run for the hills. In the case of this game, it’s well done and accurate. Blue Estate uses the Dualshock 4’s built-in gyroscope to control the action. It does not use the lightbar sensor/PlayStation camera combination. So you won’t need extra hardware to play the game. It’s nice that HeSaw didn’t make having the camera necessary, however, having that as an optional control method would have made aiming a little better. All you need to do is point your controller at an enemy and fire with R2.

The issue with the gyroscopic function of the Dualshock 4 controller (at least for this game) is that it constantly needs to be calibrated. Thankfully, it’s really simple. You only need to point the controller at the center of your screen and hit either L1 or the up button on the d-pad. It’s takes the tiniest fraction of a second to do so. The only problem I have with this game is that you need to calibrate it often.  It starts to really get in the way of your enjoyment of an otherwise great game. To be good at this game, you will start to realize that you will be calibrating after every section and each time you reload your gun.

If Blue Estate had used the lightbar sensor, there would have been a lot less frustration…if any. I can only speculate that adding another control method would have been both costly and increase development time.  But in the end, gyroscopic controls was a fun way to play the game and playing with the analog sticks to aim would have been a horrible decision. The aiming is precise and you’ll have no trouble at all getting headshots. It was much more fluid than I could have imagined.

While Blue Estate suffers a little bit in motion controlling, the game is actually the BEST to showcase the Dualshock 4’s touchpad. This is the shining example of what the PS4 Controller can add to a game. You use the touchpad 30+ times in each level. You’ll use for all sorts of tasks such as, using it to pick up health and ammo, opening doors, to melee an enemy who gets to close, to jump and climb things, wipe the hair out of Tony’s eyes or to shake off a “leg humping Chihuahua” who loves Clarence a little to much. You are given a QTE on screen notification of what gesture you need to make on the touchpad. While the game doesn’t make use of the built in speaker, it will require you to use the touchpad…a lot. But because the game is on-rails, you don’t use the right analog stick at all or the face buttons much which will free up your hand to make the gestures. I used the touchpad more in this 4 hour game than I have for every other game combined.

Swipe up to kick off the Chihuahua

The game is short. There’s 7 levels which span 6 unique environments will give you a four hour joyride. At the end of each level, you are given a report card on how well you do. You are rated on the following categories:

• Best Combo
• Quick Gestures
• Melee Attacks
• Average Enemy Lifespan
• Shooting Accuracy
• Warning Sign Kills (You get notified when an enemy is about to shoot you)
• Headshots
• Nutshots
• Collectibles

Depending how well you do in each of these categories, your are given a star ranking. As you’d expect, there is a trophy for getting an overall 4 star rank on each level as well as another for finding all the collectibles.

There is also a leaderboard so you can see how you stack up against all players or just your friends. It’s a combination of those leaderboards and the star rank system that will give this game replay-ability. The game poses quite the challenge too, especially on crazytrain difficult. You start the game with a set number of lives. When you have depleted all of your lives, you will have to start the level over again. Thankfully, each time you need to do that, you are given an extra life for your next attempt. For the hardcore, there is that crazytrain difficulty. Unfortunately, this isn’t available from the start and it will require you to complete the game on any other difficulty first.

For the trophy hunter out there, the trophy list is not going to be easy. The most difficult ones will be getting a 4 star rank on every level (any difficulty) and beating the game on crazytrain difficulty. Other than that, there is one tied to each of the three boss fights and one for finding all the collectibles as well as a few other miscellaneous ones. True to the games humor itself, there is a trophy for performing 200 nutshots called “Nutcracker”. Stay tuned for PS4Trophies  guides on YouTube that you have come to love.

As for my review score, I do have to knock it down a bit for the need to constantly calibrate your controller. When calibrated, using the capabilities of the controllers sensors is a great and rewarding control method. While the game is short in length, the game does offer a great reason go back and replay levels and the humor, as long as don’t ever take the game seriously, is really funny. I loved every second of the game even if the story was a little cheesy and thin. Rail Shooters is a genre filled with awful games and Blue Estate proves that the stigma we have for this genre is unwarranted.  You can’t just take people on a rail journey and make it a shooting gallery. You have to give players more than a target to shoot.  Blue Estate does that by providing us with a fun, humor filled story with an exceptional use of the touchpad which adds a new dimension to rail games. In my opinion, this is a game worth buying.

Review Score   7.5/10