Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Blue Estate is a first-person on-rails shooter game available for download from the PlayStation Store for the PS4. Blue Estate is based upon a comic book by Viktor Kalvachev with exceptional stories, art and humorous dialogue that collectively create a world of characters that depicts a world of comic violence with the game effectively providing a prequel to the events of the first season of Blue Estate comics as the most important characters of the game are featured in the comic books. So if you like the humour and the pacing of the game, then it would be worth checking out the comic books for some back story for each character and their world.

The story of Blue Estate follows the lead character Tony Luciano who is the only son of Don Luciano; who is effectively the mob boss in charge of the West Coast Cosa Nostra located in Los Angeles. The game makes it very clear from the outset that Tony and is family are no heroes, if anything Tony Luciano is an anti-hero in the sense that it is his mission to save a girl called Cherry Popz who works at Tony’s club called The Smoking Barrel as a dancer. However, Cherry Popz has not just been kidnapped by any random person, but actually by the Sik brothers who own their rival club that she was ordered to dance for against her own will and as Tony Luciano does his absolute best to save Cherry Popz; he is thrust into a world where he will meet a wide array of characters, while every moment could be his last as there are dozens of gangsters ready to shoot him at every turn. However, there is another lead character that you will also have the opportunity to control called Clarence who is a dishonourably discharged ex-navy seal on the brink of bankruptcy due to serious money problems with the major connection of his story coming from the fact that in order to survive bankruptcy; he has become the top killer for none other than Don Luciano and while that may clear his debts and money problems, it only gets him into deeper trouble with anyone connected to those who he kills for Don Luciano.

Blue Estate is quite violent, bloody and gory as you kill hordes of enemies as you carry up to two weapons at a time including pistols, shotguns and machine guns, alongside many more, while being rather adult in its themes of humour and a stripper being one of the main characters.

Scoring points is essential to improve your positioning on the leaderboards and there are a number of methods to increase your score, such as killing each enemy will score points, but getting a headshot or a nutshot will provide you with bonus points as will environmental kills and combos of multiple kills chained together, although you will lose your combo if you are shot. It is also important to attempt to spot hidden objects, such as lucky cats and golden gongs from the surrounding environments as shooting them will score points, although you will only get one set of points for shooting each lucky cat; you will actually earn bonus points for each time you shoot the same golden gong. However, it can sometimes be difficult to pick out the hidden objects amongst the scenery as you also have to concentrate on the enemies that are attempting to kill you, while also looking for health packs, ammo pick-ups and weapons, alongside trying to find slo-mo symbols that will send everything into slow motion for a temporary period of time after you have shot them.

You receive five lives when you start a level, but if you do not complete the level successfully, then you will be provided with an additional life to help you progress beyond the level when you next attempt to complete it, which is a great design choice as it makes you want to return to the level as you will have an advantage; regardless of whether you feel the difficulty of a particular area of a level is too much due to an overly large horde of enemies appearing out of nowhere and crowding around you as you will have that extra life to provide you with the hope that you can progress further.

The level design is exceptional as it varies from indoor clubs and counterfeiting operations to luscious outdoor locations with subtle details placed amongst the levels, which is made even more impressive as the environments are destructible. As you hide behind walls, panels, chairs, tables or general objects when in cover; you will find that as the enemies shoot in your direction that the cover will deform and eventually become unusable due to the penetration of bullets, while the same can be said for the surrounding environments and there are explosive environmental hazards, such as red gas tanks that can be used to destroy your enemies’ cover or to conserve bullets by killing nearby enemies.

The enemy design has a great deal of variety from not only how each enemy looks, but also by how certain enemies will have their own striking patterns with particular enemies choosing to engage in melee combat by throwing objects at you, while others will decide to use a blade. There are also behaviour patterns of how a group of enemies with guns will individually choose to attack in their own methods as certain enemies will run at you all guns blazing, while others will duck behind cover and be more selective about exactly when to shoot at you and even enemies will choose just to wear clothing when others will wear varying degrees of armour underneath their clothing to make them harder to kill, which shows diversity amongst the positively intelligent artificial intelligence.

Roy Devine Junior is a private investigator whose voice-over will tell the story from the outside looking in with a voice-over that is as humorous as the various equally hilarious captions, such as from an area of the first level in which he explains how he has obtained information from a secret informant who is a highly reliable source in which a caption pops up to reveal that his information was actually obtained from Wikipedia, which is quite funny as everyone knows that Wikipedia can be updated by anyone and therefore requires further research to clarify the initial information provided. Tony Luciano is also full of comic relief as he regularly shows affection for how he loves his hair, but complains frequently about how it keeps on getting into his eyes and blocking his vision of oncoming hordes of enemies by saying, “I think I need more hair gel!”, while he also complains about how often he has to reload his gun with comments, such as “Which pocket did I put my bullets in?” and “Didn’t I just reload this thing?”, while there is a scenario in the first level in which Tony Luciano says, “Wet floor sign, huh? You would actually have to clean this place to get it wet!” Just as he starts to fall on his backside from the wet floor, along with the caption, “They did”. If you look around the environments carefully, then you may find some rather amusing jokes or references, such as the elevator at the start of the second level has “Dennis Rodman was here” engraved into it and considering who the first villain is a skit on; it is obvious to see what the engraving is referring to and certainly provides some laughs in both cases.

There are detailed stats at the end of each level presented in a table and split into general stats and shooting stats categories with every stat having a zero to a four star rating based upon the strength of your performance within each area. The general stats for each level include: the amount of kills that formed your best combo; quick gestures; melee attack kills; and the average enemy lifespan, while the shooting stats include: the percentage of your shooting accuracy; warning sign kills; headshots; nutshots; and the amount of destroyed lucky cat ornaments, alongside your top five personal scores for that particular level. The detailed breakdown of the stats is a great design choice as it allows you to analyse your performance through the course of each level and realise the areas your performance rating is falling, so you can improve accordingly within the stats that only have one or two stars, rather than the potential four star ratings.

Blue Estate supports the share feature that allows you to upload a video clip to Facebook or Twitter; upload a screen shot to Facebook or Twitter; and broadcast live gameplay footage via Twitch or Ustream as you are experiencing the game with a simple tap of the share button and selecting the option of your choice. The PS4’s hard-drive continuously stores your most recent fifteen minutes of gameplay footage, so you still have the chance to decide if you would like to share something amazing a few minutes after it has taken place. The share feature is a next-gen revolution that has only improved with the further customisation provided by the Share Factory app that allows commentary, music, themes, stickers, effects, text, picture-in-picture video between your game footage and your reaction from the PlayStation Camera and much more besides, which will only continue to prosper and flourish as it matures with additional features and further experimentation in the future.

Blue Estate supports the remote play feature that allows you to play almost any PS4 game on your PlayStation Vita via a Wi-Fi internet connection by pairing up the PS4 and Vita via configuring the settings on your PS4 to enable the Vita to connect to it, then entering the code provided from the settings menu on the Vita’s PS4 Link application with the initial setup taking around only two minutes. Blue Estate’s performance during remote play is amazing, particularly in regards to the graphics and audio as it performs exactly as you would expect the PS4 version to do so. The only partial let down is the remote play control scheme in which you must shoot with the top right of the rear touch pad, which is certainly not ideal as the rear touch pad can be a bit hit or miss in regards to the result in relation to where you are tapping it. However, there are some pretty good elements to the remote play control scheme, such as the gesture swipes being mapped to the touch screen, which makes perfect sense; as does pressing the square button to reload and hide behind cover, pressing triangle to change weapons and pressing L to reset the crosshair to the centre of the screen, alongside having to move the Vita to aim your gun via the gyroscopic motion sensing functionality, which is as accurate as that of the DualShock 4 controller. It is just unfortunate that the shooting button was not mapped to R or X as that would have made for the perfect control scheme during remote play on the Vita, especially considering that is the only criticism that I would level at the remote play control scheme and that the remote play performance is otherwise absolutely perfect all round.

The controls make the most of the DualShock 4’s features, while creating a control scheme that is easy to master. The face buttons within the control scheme consists of pressing R2 to shoot; pressing L2 to reload; holding L2 to find cover behind an object; pressing R1 or triangle to switch between your weapons; pressing L1 or up on the d-pad to centre the crosshair to make aiming easier; pressing X to validate chosen options; pressing O to go back in menus; pressing the share button takes you to the share feature menu; and pressing the options button to display the pause menu. The touch pad implementation is excellent and utilised to its maximum potential as you swipe in the direction an on screen arrow is prompting you to do so in order to fulfil various gestures, such as collecting items, such as ammo boxes and health packs; to opening, interacting or deflecting an object and to even fight enemies with melee attacks using your gun when your gun is out of ammo and you do not have time to reload as an enemy is running towards you, alongside the hilarious scenario of having the fringe of your hair flicking forward to obscure your view during a gunfight.

Every time your character is shot by an enemy; you will notice the light bar switches from the standard blue colour to a dark red colour, which gradually fades in tone until the wound has healed before returning to the standard blue colour, while the DualShock 4 controller also vibrates whenever your character has been shot. It is great to see appropriate uses for the light bar and vibration features, although the light bar implementation could have been expanded further to incorporate more colours for more actions, such as the light bar turning green when you collect a health pack or turning yellow when you have collected an ammo pack, while the vibration could have also been used in occurrences of shooting one of the hidden objects from the surrounding environments, such as the lucky cats or golden gongs and perhaps even when you have performed a special kill, such as an environmental kill, nutshot or headshot.

Blue Estate is lacking support for one of the most sought after control schemes for a game within this genre and that is the PlayStation Move, which works perfectly for games within this genre, such as House of the Dead and Time Crisis with House of the Dead: Overkill on PS3 particularly having perfected the art of re-creating an arcade experience with the PlayStation Move and the PlayStation Move’s gun shaped peripheral. However, PlayStation Move support would require the PlayStation Camera, so in that regard HeSaw should actually be praised for saving people from having to buy another peripheral in order to get the best out of the game and instead getting the best out of the DualShock 4’s gyroscopic motion sensing functionality.

You can certainly tell that Blue Estate is powered by the Unreal Engine, especially with the debris and explosions from the destructible environments, while the enemy design and level design both have a great variety in regards to the amount of diversity between the looks of each enemy and the wide range of surrounding environments, alongside excellent art direction throughout the entirety of the game.

The game showcases some of its adult themes even before you have navigated beyond the menus with one of the lead characters Cherry Popz wearing a rather revealing outfit and performing pole dancing routines. The presentation of the game is solid with a great user interface across various menus such as the main menu, level selection and mode menu, online leaderboards, help menu, settings menu and gameplay menus with support for navigation via the face buttons and the gyroscopic motion sensing functionality, although it does not include support for navigation via the left or right analogue sticks, d-pad and touch pad as the navigation is the same as you would experience in the mechanics of the gameplay and while the navigation is far from the norm; it certainly works rather well.

The audio consists of voice-overs, sound effects and music with the voice-overs for all of the characters being rather precise to their characters’ personas as the lines of dialogue are funny and will certainly provide some laughter. The sound effects vary from guns being fired and explosions to environments and cover being destroyed and tearing apart into debris, while the music contains a mixture of genres that are always appropriate for the situations and environments you will find yourself in.

The trophy list includes thirteen trophies with nine bronze trophies, three silver trophies and one gold trophy. The easiest trophy has to be the Entered the Dragon bronze trophy for completing the first level in solo mode, while there is also the This Thing of Ours bronze trophy for completing the first level in co-op mode. There is a number of accumulative aiming and accuracy related trophies, such as the Headhunter bronze trophy for killing 3,000 enemies with headshots in solo mode and the Nutcracker bronze trophy for killing 200 enemies by shooting them in the nuts in solo mode. There are some harder trophies, such as the A Good Earner silver trophy for finding and shooting all of the hidden objects in solo mode; the Wiseguy silver trophy for obtaining a four star rating for every level in solo mode; and the Capo gold trophy for completing the last level when playing in the Crazytrain difficulty level. I would estimate depending upon skill and a good trophy guide to provide some helpful tips that it would take between ten to fifteen hours to 100% the trophy list.

There are three difficulty levels including: normal, abnormal and crazy train with the crazy train difficulty level remaining locked until you have completed the game on the normal or abnormal difficulty level. The major difference from one difficulty level to the next does not revolve around an increased enemy count as there are already enough enemies during the normal difficulty level, although there is a noticeable increase in the accuracy of enemies’ aiming capabilities as their shots will usually inflict more damage to your character, while the enemies will also react faster by firing upon your character faster in a harder difficulty in comparison to the easier difficulty, which applies pressure to you to step up your own reaction times in order to kill all or at least as many of the enemies as possible before they have a chance to get a shot off on your character.

The local co-operative multiplayer is entertaining as it allows you to experience the entire game with a friend, although it has to be set to local co-operative multiplayer before you start playing as it lacks a drop-in/drop-out option, while the first player has a gun and the second player only has a reticule; therefore the local co-operative multiplayer is not without those couple of flaws, but it is entertaining and performs just as well as the single player component. However, there is another element that improves the local co-operative multiplayer in the form of the points scoring is not co-operative and instead applies to a competitive format in which both players will attempt to outdo one another by killing the enemies first with stylish environmental kills, nutshots and headshots to accumulate more points than their co-operative partner, so in essence it could actually be classed as co-operative competitive multiplayer.

The online leaderboards focuses on global rankings, your personal score and your friends’ scores for each individual level, while also having separate leaderboards to showcase player’s scores across all three difficulty levels with each leaderboard containing each player’s rank; name (PSN ID); score; and your highest combo with the positioning of each player based upon their overall score. While using the overall score is a great way of measuring the positions of the leaderboards for each level; I thought there would have been separate sets of leaderboards with such variations of measuring the positioning of the leaderboards by the fastest times set by each player to complete each level of the game and the overall game. Another possibility would have been to filter the results by the highest combo, alongside having the inclusion of being able to filter via the star rating of each player across each level and overall game with zero stars being the lowest and four stars being the highest ranked players, which collectively would have made an already competitive set of online leaderboards that much better with more information provided for each player’s performances and more variety of measuring the positioning of the online leaderboards.

The replayability of Blue Estate stems from many areas as there are four star ratings that will make you want to strive to improve your performance for a better rating across numerous categories and your overall performance, while there is the task of finding all of the hidden objects throughout each of the levels; three difficulty levels allowing you to experience an easier or harder challenge; local co-operative multiplayer for you to play the entire game with a friend on the same screen and competitive online leaderboards, which collectively provides more than enough replay value to have you returning to the game for quite sometime.

Overall, Blue Estate is an exceptional on-rails first-person shooter that is the first of its genre to arrive on PlayStation 4 and while that means it effectively has the field to itself; even if there were plenty of on-rails first-person shooters out for the PS4, then it would still be highly recommend. Blue Estate has an old school charm to it that resonates from the over-the-top blood, gore, violence, adult themes and humour, which quite simply results in the game being highly recommended, especially if you are a fan of light gun games and if you are familiar with the comics the game are based upon, then it is another positive reason to purchase this game in regards to seeing all of those characters realised in a game, while if you are not familiar with the material, then you will be captured enough by it to explore the comic book stories that follow the events of Blue Estate. With such excellent graphics, art design, destructible environments, an experimental yet very precise control scheme, plenty of humour and replay value; there is no reason for you to not experience such a quality game on PS4!

Jason Bonnar

Analysis

• Title: Blue Estate
• Developer: HeSaw
• Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
• System: PS4
• Format: PSN Download
• Cross-Buy: No
• Cross-Play: No
• Multiplayer: Yes (2 Players Local Co-Operative/Online Leaderboards)
• Hard Drive Space Required: 2.7GB