Given that Fullblast isn't a bullet-hell shooter (it's more bullet-not-too-bad) it's actually a feasible challenge that's not too daunting for a decent first time player to get good at. Thankfully, you are given a decent amount of chances not to die as your ship is blessed with an energy bar that can sponge up a number of hits before you explode into flames. You'll also need to keep an eye out to avoid pick-ups which decrease your power – as if avoiding bullets wasn't enough… Occasionally, extra bomb pick-ups can be found within a stage, but they are few and far between. This means dying on any of the boss battles not only puts you back to the lowest power, you don't even get your bomb replenished this can prove quite brutal. Another quirk is the 'smart bomb' quantity of which you have only one per game, not per life. Unfortunately a misguided gameplay decision means that loss of life drops you right back to square one, and suddenly you'll find yourself reverted to a pea-shooter with no chance to gather back any of your lost power-ups.
In fact, in terms of power-ups it's rather thin on the ground there are two different weapons to swap between (via pick-ups) - a forward shot and a slightly spread out shot, both of which can be powered-up multiple times until a bullet colour change signifies the maximum level has been reached. Your ship handles just fine, which is a good thing as there are no speed altering pick-ups. The gameplay is smooth, and controls are responsive – even the analogue stick works well, which isn't always the case in this genre arcade joysticks are the usual required weapon of choice. Breaking up the stages are cut scenes of sorts, but there is a lot of repeated dialogue and the English translation is laughably bad in places (which is possibly intentional, but if not it's at least quite amusing). Due to this slight lack of variety each of the 4 grouped stages can feel like one long, huge slog which gets tiresome when attempting to play through in one credit. The 12 stages take place across 3 different landscape backdrops – a city, a forest and over icy waters. It's therefore slightly refreshing to pick up and play something a little more back to basics – no complicated scoring system or walls of projectile death to navigate you simply shoot enemies, avoid some bullets and get some points. The bullet-hell trend (championed by prolific Japanese developer Cave) combines insane levels of difficulty with incredibly complicated scoring systems that require hours of mastery to understand. It's fair to say many modern day 'shmups' are arguably too intense for newcomers to cope with.
The gameplay remains firmly locked inside a 2D plane of movement the graphic engine is used to chuck in a few little flourishes of depth that wouldn't be quite as easily achieved with hand drawn sprites. Harking back to the days when arcades were king, Fullblast is an old school vertically scrolling shoot-em-up presented with modern 3D graphics. Fullblast is the latest indie title to make the transition from mobile platforms onto Wii U, having been available on iOS and Android since the end of last year.
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