Gaming Target - Xbox: Blinx: The Time Sweeper

Written by Gavin Wright on November 01, 2002

Full Review: Go out and buy Blinx now. Hell, if you don't like it all you gotta do is hit the good ol' rewind button and you're back at the store, right?

The first glimpse we caught of Blinx: The Time Sweeper at last year's E3 expo displayed a game with a lot of promise. With a delightfully ambitious design, Artoon's hopeful platformer seemed ready to turn the genre on its ears, with enough potential to leave Mario and the rest of its wannabe spin-offs in the dust. But while Blinx's intriguing premise of time control had been discussed extensively before its release, details regarding the rest of the game appeared to have been conveniently left out of the picture. Now that Blinx is finally out, it's not difficult to see why they might have taken this approach Ц the remainder of the game simply could not hold up on its own.

Blinx is an engineer at the Time Factory, where time is manufactured and sent off to various worlds. One day a gang of bandits, known as the Tom-Toms, intercept a shipment of time crystals being sent to world B1Q64 with the intent to sell them to rival worlds for profit. A voice over the intercom calls for all the employees stationed in B1Q64 to evacuate. In an act of defiance, Blinx charges bravely onward in an attempt to save the world from certain destruction. With the crystals stolen, the world has been ripped apart by glitches in the threads of time, and Blinx must defeat all the time monsters to return the planet back to its original state.

By collecting the correct types of time crystals (which are dropped after defeating time monsters), Blinx actually gains the ability to alter the flow of time. Each crystal corresponds to a different type of time manipulation, allowing Blinx to Rewind, Fast-Forward, Pause, Slow, or Record time while still moving independently. Considering that nothing like this has ever been done before in the realm of video games, the results are surprisingly solid. The abilities have a wide array of practical uses in the game, and the feature never comes off to be a gimmick.

The Rewind function is used to reverse the flow of time. Standing next to a broken bridge and hitting Rewind will piece the bridge back together, granting you safe passage to the other side. Alternatively, standing on the head of a crumbled statue and hitting Rewind will return the statue to its original state, and it'll even take Blinx up with it. Rewind can also be used to reverse the movement of falling logs or barrels, allowing you to hop on them and hitch a ride back up to their source. It should be noted that while you are rewinding time Blinx is free to move about as he wishes, since only his environment is affected.

Fast-Forward is used to temporarily speed up Blinx's running speed (which is normally quite slow, might I add), which can be helpful when you're running out of time towards the end of a level. It also creates a shield around Blinx that protects him from any attacks during the short amount of time that the ability is in effect.

Pause and Slow are used to stop or slow down the flow of time, respectively. Although Pause may be a bit more effective in certain situations, they both serve the same basic function, allowing Blinx to freeze traps or walk upstream through waterways with ease. There's even a nice little effect that accompanies this action, with the water parting as Blinx walks through it, then flooding back into position as soon as time returns to normal.

Perhaps the most impressive of Blinx's time manipulation capabilities is his ability to Record himself performing an action and play it back so that you have a Уghost BlinxФ working right alongside you to get past complicated puzzles or particularly difficult enemies. You can record about 10 seconds worth of Blinx's actions, and while you're recording the character is invulnerable to enemy attacks. This ability comes in handy during situations that would normally require two people to accomplish. For instance, in one level you are given a seesaw positioned at the bottom of a tall cliff. By recording the action of Blinx jumping on one end of the seesaw, you can then hop onto the other end so that you'll have the Уghost BlinxФ send you flying up and over the cliff. Some of the uses for the Record ability are truly ingenious, but their solutions are almost always glaringly obvious.

You must collect time crystals in a particular order to activate Blinx's time control powers. Each of the six color-coded crystals corresponds to the different time manipulation abilities. Blinx can carry up to four crystals at a time, and three of the four must be of the same type in order to receive the ability. If all four are the same, you'll be able to perform the ability twice. But if you assemble any other combination of the four crystals they will all be discarded, rendering them unusable for the rest of the level. But since crystals often drop closely to one another, in some cases there simply isn't any way around grabbing the wrong ones.

The game is broken up into 8 themed levels, each composed of three stages and a boss fight at the end. You're given only ten minutes to complete each stage, and the sole objective in each level is to kill all the time monsters and reach the goal point at the end. If Blinx is so much as touched by an enemy he will die, although collecting Retry crystals will give you what are basically extra lives. Retrys come into play as soon as you die by rewinding the game about 10 seconds to a point before your death, granting you the opportunity to take on a different approach to the situation.

The levels in Blinx are relatively small in size, although their length accommodates the ten-minute time limit adequately. Most levels will require multiple run-throughs in order to grab the necessary crystal combos (since you'll often find yourself having wasted the time crystals needed to pass an obstacle in a level) and make it in under the time limit. Repetition is the key to success in the game, but it's not really an interesting prospect for a platformer.

Blinx's sole weapon is a hyper-powered vacuum cleaner used to suck up and shoot trash at enemies. Trash is found scattered throughout the levels, and can come in the form of anything from park benches to rusted-out cars. You can only hold up to five pieces of trash at a time (although that can later be upgraded to 10), so it's best to seek out larger objects since they inflict more damage. The enemies attack in definite patterns that can easily be picked up on, but it can take some serious skill to stay on your feet amidst a room full of enemies with varied plans of attack. Blinx has few conventional moves outside of the double-jump and backflip, so those expecting a Mario-esque array of signature moves are likely to come away disappointed. It almost gives you the feeling that a good deal of the game was slapped together only as a supplement to Blinx's much-hyped time control elements, which is definitely not the ideal way to build a game.

Not only is the combat quite simple, it can also be somewhat frustrating at times. For one, Blinx's vacuum device has an inkling of an auto-aim feature that's intended to aid in firing trash at enemies, but it rarely works as well as it should. Also, since the game rewinds itself every time you die, you may be hit just as you're defeating an enemy, only to have the game rewind itself and find the enemy still there. In other words, it's not possible to sacrifice your own health to defeat an enemy. But above all, the one thing that hurts Blinx most is the ten-minute time limit. Why the developers would choose to go against years and years of progress and opt to adopt a concept that's gone unused since the 16-bit era is beyond me, but it really holds the game back.

Blinx's control scheme is pretty simple. The left joystick is used to control the character, while the right stick adjusts the camera. Trash is sucked up by holding down the R trigger, and then shot out by quickly tapping the trigger again. The A button is used to jump, and can then be tapped again to perform a double jump. Lastly, the B button brings up the time control menu, which also pauses the game temporarily while you make up your mind. Anyone could easily pick up and learn the controls in a matter of minutes.

There are a few minor camera problems in the game that do tend to get in the way of the action a bit. For one, it normally opts for a birds-eye view situated above and behind Blinx, an angle that's not exactly ideal for examining large areas. It also has a bad habit of locking onto nearby enemies and forcing you to look in a single direction. In theory this is a good thing, since it ensures that you never skip over an enemy (since you are required to kill every last one of them). But in practice it forces you to take a lot of blind jumps, and can often result in cheap, frustrating deaths.

Graphically, Blinx is undoubtedly one of the better-looking Xbox games around. Blinx himself is particularly well detailed, with some gorgeous fur shading techniques on his head and tail. While the levels aren't exactly eye-popping in size or depth, they depict a wonderfully creative fantasy world that's actually a joy to look at. This, along with the game's deliberately bright, rich color palette work to portray a world that's simply oozing with mood and atmosphere.

Blinx has no more than a handful of spoken lines in the game, but that's probably for the best considering that they're all in Japanese anyways. It's not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just that when you're trying to build a mascot you've got to give it a certain degree of character, and that's something that Blinx just doesn't have. The in-game music is sufficient, but it's not an emotionally moving score by any means. On a positive note, each level features new music, although the soundtrack as a whole can get a bit jarring after a while.