Blue Estate Review

Some pieces of entertainment cross lines of decency with purpose and wit in an attempt to challenge or educate us. Many others cross those lines unknowingly, out of ignorance rather than malice. But Blue Estate vaults over these lines knowingly, willfully, and for seemingly no reason but to wallow in adolescent squalor. Its many failed attempts at humor make its bog-standard rail-shooter gameplay all the more unbearable, but the worst part is how gleefully self-assured it is in its outdated notions of writing and design.

You only need to play Blue Estate for a minute or two to know everything there is to know about its 3ish hour-long play time. It’s an old-school arcade rail-shooter, one that doesn’t add any interesting new twists to hide the fact that all you’re doing is pointing at something and pressing a button to make it die over and over.

Perhaps you could say the same for much of the genre, but the best ones - like House of the Dead and Time Crisis - inject tension and fun into the formula with a frantic pace, over-the-top set-pieces, and crazy boss battles. Blue Estate never makes even a half-hearted attempt at any such variety. Stages drag on for what seems like forever, waves of generic, slow-moving goons line up to catch bullets for you, and the few weapon pickups do little to spice things up either. The Dual Shock 4’s motion controls are surprisingly well-suited for handling the action, but when the action is so droning and uninspired, the controls hardly matter.

There aren’t many things a game can be that I’d consider worse than “boring,” but “artlessly offensive” is one of them. From the title screen on, Blue Estate’s treatment of gender and race are a constant distraction.

There is no grey area here. Protagonist Tony Luciano literally refers to his girlfriend as a thing that belongs to him. Blue Estate commits so completely to treating women like objects, and casting people of any race into the worst possible stereotypes that you’d think it was going for satire. But by the end of the first two levels, I had given up on waiting for some sort of message. There isn’t one. It really is just a long string of unfunny, poorly-written jokes made at the expense of others. That Blue Estate only ever grabs at the lowest of low-hanging fruit is completely infuriating on its own, but the fact that its also completely unfunny just adds insult to injury.