Blimp: The Flying Adventures Review (PS Minis)

The first game Blimp: The Flying Adventures reminded us of was Crazy Taxi. Sure the game's two-dimensional, set in outer-space and puts you in control of a zeppelin rather than a taxi, but stay with us. It reminds us of Crazy Taxi because the core gameplay mechanic rotates around the concept of delivering passengers from A-to-B. Each level has a series of numbered platforms which are used as pick-up points. You carefully land your Blimp on the platform, pick-up a delightfully low resolution passenger and take them to their desired location. And that's pretty much it. There are secondary objectives like collecting random boxes, but the core gameplay is built around the taxi mechanic.

Of course, the game would be pretty boring (and not to mention easy) if the game was purely passenger delivery. Blimp: The Flying Adventures' challenge comes from its level design. There are enemies, blow-torches and all kinds of hazards out to try and halt your progress. What's more, the Blimp is quite a challenging vehicle to control. It requires careful use of the gas and analogue stick to swing around the relatively tight corridor levels. The Blimp's fun to control though. There's a floaty weight to its inertia that makes it super satisfying to flick around the environments once you nail down the physics. Sure the game design can be a bit unforgiving in places, but the short bite-sized levels are geared towards perfected playthroughs.

That's all tied together with Grip Games' now trademark PlayStation Minis leaderboard system. The game gives you a code which can be entered on the developer's official website to take part in high score challenges and what not. It's a work around for a platform that doesn't really support leaderboards, but it's functional and adds a competitive dynamic to the gameplay.

The game's got an extremely basic, but attractive hand-drawn look to it which adds interest to the environments, but Blimp: The Flying Adventures is very much a gameplay first kind of experience. The visuals are there to add context to the gameplay — and that's fine because the game is good fun.