14 DAY TRIAL // Blockstorm is a brand-new game on Steam Early Access, coming from Italian developer Ghostshark Games and combining the dudebro shooting action of Call of Duty with the infinite possibilities of Minecraft, in a nuthsell.
The voxel-based shooter seems like a very solid offering, in spite of the Early Access stamp and the program's association with less than stellar experiences. Blockstorm is definitely one of the games that the initiative was made for, as it already offers an exciting gameplay experience, in spite of it not being yet complete.
The premise of combining gunplay with voxels and building sandbox mechanics is not new, but Blockstorm is probably one of its greatest incarnations yet.
The game's main appeal comes in the form of the extensive opportunities for sidestepping the boundaries of the shooter genre by digging trenches, making new corridors and shortcuts through walls, and erecting your own fortifications.
In addition to this, Blockstorm also features completely destructible terrain, meaning that if you don't like how a sniper is always hiding out in a tower, you can always take it down. Of course, it doesn't yet have the physics to make buildings collapse under their own weight or topple if you damage their support structure, and you have to completely cut every last piece of supporting terrain, but once you do that, they'll come crashing down, taking whatever unfortunate souls happened to be there with them.
You can even build your own ramps and stairs to access previously inaccessible areas, and because bullets leave their mark on the scenery, hiding behind a couple of blocks won't offer you immunity to enemy fire.
You can use different weapons, from rifles with a slow rate of fire but higher accuracy over long distances, to close-proximity shotguns that won't even scratch your foes from afar, but won't require that much aiming when you're in close quarters, in addition to sidearms, grenades, mines and rocket launchers, and, of course, your trusty shovel and some building blocks of your own.
Your loadout affects your movement speed, making for a pretty organic scout/heavy class differentiation, as carrying lighter weaponry makes you more nimble and thus able to get out of harm's way when spotted by a sniper in the distance.
There are even editors in the game that enable you to go wild and create your own playable character models, as well as to add to the variety of the maps available, by either creating an entirely new one from scratch or modifying the existing templates.
The only area where the game seems a bit lacking is the actual shooting mechanics, as they are a bit wonky, with shots sometimes seemingly missing the target but then registering as a kill, and the sniper rifle's scope sway and reticle speed being just terrible for now.
The best thing about Blockstorm, however, is the fact that it challenges the way you think about shooters, because you can always seal off an access route and plant a few claymore mines in order to surprise an enemy engineer diligently digging his way through, and you can isolate yourself by carving a fortress in the map, complete with a quick getaway route that allows you to smash through a wall and disappear when ambushed, without nobody suspecting a thing.
Another good thing is that the blocks you add to the scenery are very easily identified, so both you and your enemies can tell right away when somebody tampered with the landscape, which makes the game less about camping and waiting for aural cues and more about finding creative ways to navigate the maps and surprise your opponents.
It's always fun to dig your way through a wall instead of merely following a corridor, and especially so when you know there's someone waiting on the other side with their gun aimed at the only access point. And although digging noises can alert nearby enemies of your intense activity, there's always something fun to do.
For now, there are just a couple of vanilla-flavored game modes such as deathmatch, team deathmatch or king of the hill, but they're enough to showcase Blockstorm's potential of blending the unfettered creativity of a construction game with the fast-paced action of a first-person shooter into something completely new, that's very fun and challenging and offers a fresh experience, breaking the mold of online shooters in an extremely blocky fashion.
