Blast Corps

When it's good, it's great; when it's bad, it's terrible*. It should go without saying it's fun to blow shit up to the game's arcade-y (yet surprisingly diverse**) soundtrack, and there are some cool cinematic touches like the fixed camera angles at the start of some levels (e.g. Ebony Coast, Crystal Rift) that show the carrier lumbering toward disaster while you rush to intervene. Returning to levels after clearing the carrier's path is oddly melancholy and spooky. I guess it's like the slightly-haunted atmosphere many people get in Super Mario 64, but here it's temporal; the game's moved on and you're rooting around in its ruinous tracks looking for a few secrets before the langoliers arrive and eat the world from under your feet. I just think it would've been better on the next console gen—enough time for devs to really get 3D controls and have the tech for more interesting level design, without the industry moving on to the Remake Age and open-world wastelands.



*though the Backlash isn't that bad as long as you remember you don't need to use its drift gimmick to destroy things and can just drive into stuff if you're in a pinch; since the Backlash tutorial has a strict time limit it's actually harder to gold-medal than most Backlash levels in the game. The only truly unfun levels are maybe Oyster Harbour, which is more a case of the designers writing cheques their engine can't cash with those damn block slot puzzles, and Diamond Sands, which is as fun as diarrhea because it's deliberately designed to make the already-jank Backlash so much harder to use.

**there are five main moods:
“Don't Forget It's The Nuclear Apocalypse”
“Oh Shit Oh Fuck It's The Nuclear Apocalypse!!”
“Have A Spring In Your Step In The Nuclear Apocalypse”
“Time To Put A Stop To The Nuclear Apocalypse”
and “Just Because There's A Nuclear Apocalypse Doesn't Mean You Can't Light Up And Relax”