The humble Rail Shooter, is kind of a lost genre in 2022. And even in this game's release date of 2015 it was pushing it. But back in the 90s these things were the jam. Or at lease some kind of spread you'd find across the 32 bit consoles and late DOS and early Win95 titles.

Rather than the game allow you to control the player, it locked you in to a single screen and you would aim and shoot what popped up. Think Safari Hunt, (and Duck Hunt if you were a Nintendon't) and moved into a 3D space.

As the genre would evolve the genre would slow, allowing limited camera movement, the ability to swap weapons, multiple paths, storylines, and the gobbling of your 20c pieces if it was an arcade.

And in 2015 a crude and violent game with a very long name was released.

Essentially split into two parts, you play as with Tony Luciano, who needs some hair gel, or Clarence, who is bald and most likely does not have any use for hair gel.

This is important to the game play. And I'm not joking.

Tony is the son of the Italian Mafia's Godfather in the City of Angels. I'm told this is LA, but as my knowledge of America is based on what content they release to the isle of Australia (which we know does not exist), I'm also not sure if LA even exists and it only is 'real' for compuvideogames and movies.

Clarence is an ex-Navy SEAL. Not the kind with flippers, but his opening mission does cause him to spend a lot of time in sewers and water, so it is possible this is also the case.

Basically, an offensive caricature of an Asian man leads a gang and did some very bad stuff. Also a horse called 'Blue Estate' gets stolen.

You can safely ignore most of this, fans of the comic it is based on will be the ones who get anything out of it. The humour is more the banter and commentary of Luciano, the 'support' Clarance gets, and the random popup FBI correction humour. It is crude, offensive, and just plain wrong...

And it made me laugh.

Mechanically, you have a gun. It has infinity ammo. You will never run out of bullets. But you will have to reload.

One of the complaints of the game I saw when looking up what others had to say on it was the lack of an auto-reload. I think they missed the point on how the shooty shooty kill kill works in Blue Estate. While reasonably fast paced, you do need to aim carefully and duck and cover when you are out (or low) in order to reload.

This did take me a level or two to get used to. Holding down the correct and right mouse button does not stop you from reloading. Dive behind that flimsy wooden plate like it was made of steal and rearm yourself, then pop out an headshot all the idots who think they can kill you.

And shortly into every level you can find a second gun with, le gasp, limited ammo. This is either a big fuck off canon of a weapon, or a rapid spray and pray assault rifle most often used to hold up convenience stores for $14 and change or to protect yourself from the 30 to 50 feral hogs that stop you looking like a hero as your arse is hanging out at the Walmart.

Thankfully you can find ammo that conveniently fits your second gun just sitting around. And floating health shields to regenerate yourself with gaming plot magic. Again, don't worry about the logic. It is "Viktor Kalvachev's Blue Estate: The Game".

While I really did not bother with them, there is an arcade mode and various difficulties. You can replay these to beat your own score as nobody else on your steam friends list plays old stuff like you do, or run it for achievements.

Like finding all the collectables, or shooting people in the balls 200 times with far less blood that should be present for such an action.

I was kinda surprised at the visuals in this one. Some set pieces look gorgeous, lots of detail and thought put into having a big opening act. And the Unreal engine, despite Epic being expletive deleted runs it beautifully and without any hiccups.

And then...

And then it gets dark. Not just some dark humour, I mean visually dark. Unit corridors and tunnels make it hard to see anything. Your attention is brought to where it should be, most of the time, with telegraphed acts and warnings where enemies will pop up. Often quite predictively. And reticles/circles will appear over those about to shoot you, giving you time to aim. But often, and more than I liked, were there mooks hiding in the dark. Shooting at you. And with little to no muzzle flash letting you know where they were.

As far as I could tell this was not a driver or engine problem. They just sit in the shadows and try to kill you. This is smart. Baddies should be trying this in reality. But in a game? In a game you want to be able to see them.

As the game progresses you can see levels have less thought put in to them, lots of warerhouse or factory type areas. And while it is figuratively a near literal breath of fresh air once you get to the final level (and bonus level), it is that middle chunk that is the most disappointing.

Thankfully the audio is sharp, explosive, and bombastic. While there's nothing memorable, the octane here keeps it pumping and knows when to quieten down in transition scenes.

It all moves at a rapid pace though, so while I did get some laughs at the jokes and FBI warnings, it had moved on so fast that none of it is really memorable. And precious time is given to slam F12 to get a screenshot.

Is it average and unremarkable? Yeah... Kinda.

I think reviews were too hard on it for not being a full FPS. It's a damned rail Shooter. Treat it like one.

But it has enough visual fidelity and entertainment that I got a good couple of hours out of it. And if you are looking for a reasonably polished title in this genre, it is worth a look.

Game Acquisition: Bundle Stars (Killer 8)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 7 November 2021 - 4 January 2022
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows Vista
Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: ATI or NVidia card w/ 512 MB RAM (not recommended for Intel HD Graphics cards)
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 3 GB available space