Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread PC Review

Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread is the debut game by Allods Team Arcade, and for a first game, it’s a great thing! The game is a Saturday morning cartoon-inspired metroidvania run-and-gun platformer. You are a member of a military group that deals with supervillain-type characters, and, on your way to beat the bad guy, your plane gets shot down, and now you have to fight your way through their island of evil goons!

Firstly, if you can’t handle something being immensely silly, then Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread probably isn’t for you. You will have to sit through some rather cartoonishly lousy dialogue, but it can be difficult to tell whether or not that’s the whole point. The villain comes across as the bad guy from any number of shows like this. Think Kim Possible, Phineas and Ferb, or The Powerpuff Girls. You’re a secret agent that must defeat a more cartoonish Dr. Evil than even Austin Powers had to face!
 

Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread is stylish, though. The game sticks to its cartoon origins with a slick art style to go along with it. It feels like playing one of those old cartoons! Although there are slightly more adult themes, and characters actually die, it isn’t exactly rendered non-adult, but more along the lines of a good ole nostalgia trip with a few darker themes and the occasional very mild swear word.

But all of this is in service to a great experience because Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread is fun to play. You make your way through the map, exploring every nook and cranny, with a very readable metroidvania map. And, in that sense, this game does a phenomenal job because metroidvanias tend to screw up this aspect quite a lot. You will pretty much never get lost because the game is great at signposting where to go and what to do. You will never feel like you have no idea where to go, and that is probably the worst mistake that most metroidvania games make. You reach a point where you meander around for ages without a clue as to where to go, but Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread is easy to navigate.

This means that you can focus your attention where it matters: the combat. Now, first of all, the combat can be a little unwieldy at times, especially when you hit the boss fights. We’ll discuss the boss fights soon enough, though. Regular enemies tend to be relatively easy to deal with, but various types necessitate strategies that can become annoying. For instance, there was one section that was on the way to a challenging boss, and so it had to be fought repeatedly, but to reach it, you had to jump onto a very small platform with nowhere to go and not enough time to shoot the flying enemy before it could hit you first. This kind of thing happens very seldom, though. So at least there’s that.

However, most of the time, Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread has enemies that are easy enough to deal with but present enough of a challenge to keep you coming back. Some need to be sprinted past; some need to be dodged and then struck; some have to be hit from certain directions, etc. It’s often more like playing a puzzle shooter. Still, the combat sections can be like repetitious puzzle encounters because Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread is often repetitious.

This is especially a problem when you repeatedly die against a boss and have to trek across the map. So, you may get to the point of simple frustration because you need to fight the same enemies repeatedly before retrying the boss, enemies that can be finicky to fight. Speaking of bosses, Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread does not have the best bosses.

Bosses can be absolute bullet sponges, but they also have very specific telegraphed attacks. This means that you’ll likely die against them several times as you learn their attack patterns, but even once you’ve learned the pattern, they can be rather annoying and take up more time than they should. This isn’t great, but not ultimately a deal-breaker. The great world, combat outside boss fights, and general presentation more than makeup for some clumsy boss fights. But it would have been good if they’d included multiple difficulty settings for those who may struggle because the boss fights are massive difficulty spikes that screw with the overall pacing of Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread going for it.

However, that is just the combat. Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread is also a platformer. And here’s where it may be good to be a little more critical. The platforming can often be immensely demanding, and if you’ve messed up a few times already, you’ll probably die and have to trek from the checkpoint again. It’s almost as if the game is trying to be a cartoonish, not quite as difficult version of Dark Souls.

A comparison that may, at first, appear ridiculous as it doesn’t have anything resembling Dark Souls in it. Aside from the fact that it essentially has an estus flask system, a checkpoint system that resets all the enemies and replenishes your health, and how you leave behind some of your gold when you get killed. Yeah… it’s maybe a little Dark Souls inspired. But Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread is, through and through, a metroidvania game first.

You do all the usual things you do in metroidvanias; unlock new abilities, find shortcuts in the map, open doors, etc. However, one significant change is in its characters because you unlock new characters as you play, each with a special ability. For instance, one has a grenade launcher that can destroy certain doors, and another has a grappling hook. So, it would be best to play the game while strategically switching between characters when needed. This can become incredibly frantic in boss battles where you might need to use the grappling hook character for the fight but need to switch to the grenade launcher character to deal with some cheap shots when you get the chance. It can contact quite intensely as you need to manage these various characters.

And this instantaneous switching between various characters is great for exploration purposes. You’ll want to explore because you want to find as many gold coins and special upgrade items as possible. After all, Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread has a mild base-building mechanic. However, it may be better to say it has a base upgrading mechanic. Either way, you can upgrade your abilities, increase health, energy, etc., and it’s all tied to a secondary upgrade system in which you build up and expand the base’s capabilities for your team.

All of this comes together to make Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread a great little thing to play with a few particular aspects that hold it back and render it irritating. If some of those aspects could have been made slightly less annoying and repetitious, then the game could have been amazing. Still, as it stands, Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread is a fun game for those who want some Saturday morning cartoon action with a great run-and-gun metroidvania attached that will last them a good 15-18 hours.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed