BlazeRush (2014, Playstation 3) Review

SKIDMARKS IN YOUR BLAZER

Also for: Android, Linux, Macintosh, Nintendo Switch, Oculus Go, Playstation 4, Tomahawk F1, Windows

---

Screenshots of BlazeRush immediately piqued my interest by evoking the spirit of isometric arcade racers from the 1980s and ’90s. I spent countless hours perfecting cornering techniques in games like Skidmarks and Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road on the Amiga, and many people still fondly remember Rock n' Roll Racing. BlazeRush clearly wants to tap into that lineage.

But this futuristic, post-apocalyptic racer from Targem Games is less about mastering driving technique and more about surviving chaos. Precision racing quickly takes a back seat to brute-force mayhem. Weapons and turbo boosts warp in constantly, turning the track into a battlefield. The controls themselves are refreshingly simple—one stick for steering, two buttons for firing and boosting—and they feel slick and responsive. Unfortunately, that elegance is undermined by the sheer visual noise. With explosions and effects constantly filling the screen, it’s often hard to tell what’s actually happening.

Clearly designed with multiplayer in mind, the camera enforces a narrow and intrusive field of view that actively discourages skillful play while cushioning weaker players. A strict rubber-banding system prevents anyone from pulling too far ahead. Fall behind, and you’re quickly pulled back into frame. Take the lead, and the camera shifts its focus toward the racers behind you, making it far harder to react to hazards in time.

This design philosophy carries over into the single-player campaign, where it makes far less sense. No matter how well I learned the tracks or how cleanly I drove, some opportunistic AI opponent would inevitably launch a homing missile in the final stretch, blasting me off the road and dumping me into last place. Eventually I adopted the same tactic myself, with better results—but then success boiled down almost entirely to luck with weapon and boost pickups.

This is most painfully felt in the “Remain in the Lead” stages. Here, the first driver to stay in front for fifty seconds wins. With five racers squeezed onto one screen, erratic camera behavior and random power-ups turn these events into exercises in frustration rather than skill. Thankfully, you don’t need to complete every event—or even play them all—to finish the campaign.

Far more enjoyable are the “King of the Hill” stages. These pit drivers against one another in a last-man-standing brawl, where the goal is to knock rivals off the road while being pursued by a massive spiked steamroller that accelerates relentlessly until it crushes everything in its path. These levels best express the game’s underlying theme of ruthless, almost cartoonish competition—and they’re the closest BlazeRush comes to fully embracing its own identity.

With each new stage introducing fresh weapons, boosters, and vehicles, the single-player campaign feels like an extended tutorial designed to funnel players toward endless multiplayer matches. Seen in that light, the final boss encounter should serve as a comprehensive test of everything you’ve learned. Instead, it’s one of the most underwhelming moments in the game: a circular track, a single lumbering enemy, and only two weapon types in circulation.

By the end of this wildly uneven experience, I can offer only the most lukewarm recommendation. Calling BlazeRush “average” feels misleading—it provoked stronger emotions than that, especially early on—but taken as a whole, average is precisely where it lands. I appreciate how easy it is to pick up, but once you’ve spent some time with it, there’s little incentive to stay. It can be a decent way to kill time, yet its emotional highs fade quickly, and its spectacular weapon effects burn bright only to disappear just as fast—like fireworks, impressive for a moment, then gone.

[Screenshots from MobyGames: www.mobygames.com]