Blazing Chrome Review
A blaze of glory.
After the well-received Oniken and Odallus: The Dark Call, Blazing Chrome is a big step up for Brazilian developer Joymasher in more ways than one. It’s Joymasher’s first game to debut on consoles (and on Xbox and PC Game Pass no less), and after two games which recreated 8-bit graphics more faithfully than most, Blazing Chrome makes the jump to the 16-bit era with grace. It’s the most faithful indie homage to 16-bit run-n-gun games I’ve seen yet, but whether or not it’s for you depends on how much of that experience you want to relive.
Where Oniken unabashedly called back to the NES Ninja Gaiden games and Odallus riffed on the Castlevania games from that era, Blazing Chrome channels Contra III: The Alien Wars, Contra: Hard Corps, and Metal Slug. With beautiful pixel art that capably replicates the grungy feel of those games and synthesized voice acting, the only things that give away Blazing Chrome as anything other than a Sega Genesis or Mega Drive game are its widescreen presentation and the fact that it’s 100 megabytes.
The scenario is your typical post-apocalyptic War Against The Machines. The game is about shooting waves of enemies – in singleplayer or local co-op, in six side-scrolling platformer stages.
Blazing Chrome is just as fast and fluid as anyone who played Contra would expect, and controls like a dream on retro-style controllers like 8BitDo’s M30. You get lock-in-place aiming, a slide move, and a melee attack. The stages themselves are varied, with enemies and platforming gimmicks unique to each one as well as vehicle segments that recall Contra III’s motorcycle and Metal Slug’s mech suit.
The selection of weapons and power-ups in Blazing Chrome is pretty light compared to the games that inspired it and similar recent indie games like Mechstermination Force and Cuphead, but gets the job done. Other than your standard assault rifle you just get three weapons (with a weapon select like Hard Corps) – an expected short-range-high-damage whip-like thing, a grenade launcher with remote detonation, and a laser gun you can fire rapidly or charge into a beam. The power-ups are support bots for defense, attack, and speed.
Through all this, what will either delight or turn away players is that like with its previous games, Joymasher chose to preserve old-school difficulty with Blazing Chrome.
Compared to its inspirations, the only concession Blazing Chrome makes to modernity is that it gives you infinite continues on normal and easy difficulty modes. There’s no health system – you die with one hit. Normal mode starts you with five lives. Losing all lives kicks you back to a checkpoint – of which some levels have multiple, but checkpoints don’t actually save when you quit, so you have to beat each level in one go. Easy mode gives you a couple more lives and drops power-ups more often but that’s about it. And there’s no chaser weapon to ease the burden of aiming like in Gunstar Heroes or Cuphead. If Blazing Chrome has a Konami Code, I haven’t found it yet.
Ultimately, the name of the game in Blazing Chrome is dying until you memorize level and enemy patterns enough to break through each successive brick wall. My first run through the game only took me four hours but it was a tough four hours. It probably isn’t as tough as Cuphead but it’s in the same ballpark.
Blazing Chrome’s post-game elements seem fine-tuned for hardcore players too. Level completion stats track your time, there are leaderboards, and there’s a speed run clock available from the beginning. Beating the game unlocks a mirror mode, hardcore mode, and two extra characters who only have melee attacks for a more Ninja Gaiden or Shatterhand-esque experience.
If you want a new Contra game, that’s exactly what Blazing Chrome promises and delivers. Joymasher has done this better than any indie developer I can think of, bringing Contra back with absolutely everything that entails.
[Reviewed on PC]