Eastasiasoft continue to be a budget shoot em up juggernaut, and their latest PC and console release is Blast’N Bounty. It’s a single-player title that places more emphasis on perfection rather than survival. That means it’s more approachable for newcomers to the genre, and will likely appeal to perfectionists wanting to top the online leaderboards.
The main gimmick of Blast’N Bounty is its drone system, and I think it’s a great idea. There are eight stages in the game, and players can tackle the first seven in any order. Your ship comes with a regular shot that fires directly up the screen, but each of the seven generals you’ll need to defeat will unlock a special drone ability as your secondary fire. These drones follow your ship around a bit like a snake. If you’ve got the homing missiles, they’ll fire powerfully but slowly. If it’s the laser drone, you’ll get powerful but thin laser zaps shooting like lightning bolts. A spread shot covers most of the screen if you’ve managed to collect three of them, but their firepower is weak.
Before each level, players can select the drone type they want to take into the next level, and you’ll discover on repeated runs that some levels and bosses are weaker to certain drone types than others. Perhaps “weaker” is the wrong word, but levels seem designed to give a perceived placement and power advantage to certain drones. The other critical thing about drones is that they act as lives, absorbing a bullet hit and removing a drone rather than a full life.
With movement nippy and consistent, and your weapons building in quantity rather than power, Blast’N Bounty chooses to go down the precision route rather than the bullet hell one. There is only one difficulty level, and the online leaderboards are full of players who have killed almost 100% of the enemies, like I almost did, likely on their first playthrough. Whilst bosses are varied with their attack patterns, they are predictably easy to avoid most of the time, and the cannon fodder enemies in the actual levels are easily overcome so long as you’ve got a few drones attached. If you lose your drones, suddenly Blast’N Bounty becomes quite scrappy until you regain them, but once you’ve regained three drones, it’s one of the easier shmups to conquer. The only minor niggle is that your hitbox is not visually shown, meaning that losing drones can feel a bit unfair when you don’t know the exact rules of engagement.
A run takes just over half an hour, and it’ll take a few runs to perfect your top score, trying out different routes and drone setups to see what scores the best points haul. Beyond that, Blast’N Bounty is a competent but quite safe vertical shooter. I can see this being a great introduction for newbies to the genre, as it does offer weapon variety and some good, if short, bosses. If you prefer a bullet hell survival approach, this might not be for you.
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