booknerd85's Full Review: Blade Runner for Windows
Los Angeles, November 2019. A glorious utopia where global warming*, traffic congestion**, housing and labor shortages***, hunger****, drought*****, and brownouts******, are all a thing of the past. You're Ray McCoy, a rookie cop who owns a flying car, and hangs out in trashy nightclubs. You drink constantly, think about nothing except your dog Maggie, and get to yell at people you've never met while making awkward gestures. Did I mention you have a flying car? Life is good.
Good, that is, until you learn that a group of Replicants (my Mother would spank me if she ever heard me call them "Skinjobs") have hijacked a space transport, killed all of the passengers, and are now threatening to destroy your fragile utopia. It turns out these Reps just want to live longer, so they go about trying to extend their lifespans the same way anyone would - blowing up, or gouging the eyeballs out of everyone who designed them. So, now it's time for you to become a Blade Runner, run all over LA collecting clues about their whereabouts, hunt them down, and riddle them with bu...I mean, "retire" them.
Westwood Interactive's Blade Runner is based heavily on the 1982 Ridley Scott film, wait for it, Blade Runner, and Phillip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which the film was (kindasorta) based on. A point-and-click third person adventure game, Blade Runner was a groundbreaking title upon it's release in November, 1997. Gameplay is entirely mouse-driven and almost entirely idiot proof. When you find an object that can be interacted with, the mouse pointer turns green, when you can move to another loction, it turns to a blue arrow, and so on. You can access your Knowledge Information Assistant, which stores all of the clues you've accumulated throughout the game, by right-clicking on your character, or you can draw your gun by left-clicking him. At points in the game, you can use an ESPER device to search photographs for important clues, or break out the Voight-Kampff machine to determine whether a suspect is a replicant or not.
Blade Runner's biggest draws are the stunningly detailed locations and the game's relentlessly bleak ambiance. Every single location from the movie, and plenty of others as well, are recreated in exacting detail. Although the graphics are now dated, and the resolution limited to 640x480, you'll want to take a minute to just stop and soak everything in the first time you enter a new location. Blade Runner's settings range from the corporate excesses of the Tyrell Building, the dingy multi-ethnic shops of Animoid Row, the leaking, creaking Bradbury Building (a wonderfully faithful recreation), to the sewers of LA, filled with toxic goo and populated by mutated survivors of the Third Terran War, and the "kipple" that surrounds the city, lit only by the fires of distant industries.
The game's audio design is extremely well done. The sound of splashing rain, humming machinery, background chatter, and that omnipresent advertising blimp, surround the player at every turn. Music is used sparingly, and although Vangelis didn't return to score this game, the music sounds virtually identical to the music in the movie. The voice acting is good for the most part, even if it's a little hammy in places. Sean Young, William Sanderson, Brion James, Joe Turkel, and James Hong all voice the characters they originally played back in 1982.
Unfortunately, for all of it's incredible immersiveness and stunningly rendered locations, Blade Runner is strangely empty and simplistic as an actual game. Gameplay consists largely of walking from one room to another, and moving the mouse pointer around until it turns green. With "player choice" selected on the Options screen, the player can choose which questions to ask other characters, and in what order. 80% of the game consists of Ray walking or flying from location to another, and listening to other characters talk. The ESPER minigame is interesting at first, until it simply becomes an exercise in selecting random areas of each photograph and hoping you acquire a clue from it. The VK sequences are virtually flawless (amusingly, "describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about...your mother" is considered a "low-intensity" question!), but the test ends after ten questions, even if you don't have a positive ID yet. The shooting sequences are also a pain. Some of them are simply unbeatable, while in other cases, gunning down a Nexus 6 replicant is apparently easier than killing a giant rat.
The plot, although it does contain some interesting twists, is anything but original. When you start a new game, three of the characters will always be Replicants from the start, with three others randomly selected as either Reps or Replicant sympathizers. They're lead by Clovis, who wears a leather jacket with an upturned collar and quotes William Blake endlessly. He's the most compelling character in the game - no doubt because he's so similar to the most compelling character in the movie! Blade Runner features a branching storyline and apparently has 13 possible endings. No matter how many different ways I've played this thing, I've only been able to get four.
Truthfully, much of the game amounts to just so much fanwank. As cool as it might be exploring all of the locales from the movie, it would have been nice to explore a bit more of downtown LA. At one point, the player is searching through the Bradbury Building for clues, and has to smash out a series of glass panels on a dresser, using it as a ladder to the next floor. In the movie, Harrison Ford has to do the exact same thing, and since the game has a parallel plotline that takes place a little latter, it begs the question: who broke the panels first, and how did they get fixed so quickly? If only the developers had put as much effort into creating a more interesting storyline, rather than recreating every pixel of the woman in the giant Coca-Cola billboard.
As an interactive movie, Blade Runner is absolutely stunning, but as an actual game, it falls flat on it's face. If you're a fan of the movie, it's worth checking out. If you've never seen it, it probably won't make a whole lot of sense. Still, for a game released in 1997 it's absolutely state-of-the-art, the only really glaring flaw being the heavily pixellated character graphics which look like they came out of a first-generation Playstation game. I found my copy at Salvation Army for $6; for that price, you really can't go wrong.
*No sunlight can penetrate the thick black smoke generated by all of the factories. **Mid-air collisions are still an issue, however. ***Plenty of 300-story skyscrapers to live in if you haven't run away from Earth yet. ****You can make food out of anything! *****It never stops raining. ******Lightbulbs are unnecessary when you have spotlights and exploding smokestacks for illumination.
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