PlayStation 2 Critic Reviews

Anybody looking for a good, mindless, old-school shoot 'em up, is going to be completely satisfied with this game. If you can turn your brain off for a while and just kill some bugs, then BlowOut is the game for you.

It's an old school, side scroller that doesn't have a lot of depth or variation but it's loaded with action and at under $20, you could call it cheap.

The game's main problem, aside from being strictly by the numbers, is the lack of a walk button. The character always runs, an dtoo fast for the game at that. [Jan 2004, p.65]

It may be mind-numbing twitch action, but it's cheap action, and the game is actually pretty fun, even though it lacks variation.

The whole station is one excruciating maze! Figuring out how to move from one position to the next is such an arduous task. Even though you may have the map, it doesn't reveal the secret passages that you need to "blowout" before you can move on.

This could be the only PlayStation game I've ever played that uses almost every button except X. Not a big deal, but worth noting. [Feb 2004, p.101]

It's not terrible, just rather pointless.

Unfortunately, it offers very few thrills, and instead, an overly cumbersome control scheme and some insanely convoluted level designs suck just about all the fun out of what could have been an entertaining shooter.

For the budget price, Blowout isn't a bad game, as it follows the rules of its genre very closely and, while offering little in the way of innovation, does at least feel like someone cared when they made it.

It has its moments, like some neat lighting effects and some balls-out action, but it's marred too often by lack of imagination and solid control, not to mention too many moments of "let's press the elevator button".