Blast Corps

What if a game, instead of having you carefully dodge obstacles, ordered you to level absolutely everything standing in your way? This wonderfully simple premise is exactly what powers Blast Corps, one of the most original and most addictively stressful games that Rare ever unleashed on the Nintendo 64 back in 1997.

The situation is urgent: a crashed transporter is carrying unstable nuclear warheads and rolls slowly but relentlessly forward along a predetermined route. If it crashes into something, disaster follows. Your task is therefore to smash every building, fence, and obstacle in its path ahead of time and clear a safe corridor for it. What could have been an ordinary action game becomes tense puzzle action, where both time and physics work against you.

The genius lies in the variety of means with which you destroy. You alternate between different vehicles and robots, each with a different demolition style: some smash on impact, others by dropping, and yet others have to get up to speed and ricochet in exactly the right direction. Learning to control, say, a machine that demolishes by stepping sideways is a small puzzle in itself, and it is precisely this variety that keeps players glued to the screen and pushing them to experiment.

In its day Blast Corps was praised as a fresh, imaginative piece that was not afraid to be completely different from the rest of the N64 lineup. Instead of familiar genre templates, it offered a concept no one had seen before and combined it with the distinctive playfulness and eye for detail that Rare was famous for in that era. It is a title that can be frustrating and liberating at the same time, depending on whether you are just making it in time or missing by a hair.

To this day it remains one of the games that Rare fans remember with a smile and a slightly nostalgic shiver down their spine, because the pressure to get everything done in time was utterly unique.

Why play: For a completely original idea and an intoxicating blend of demolition, puzzles, and time pressure you will not find anywhere else.