Publisher: NIS America

Developer: Image Epoch

Release Date: 4/23/2013

Available Exclusively On

I don’t know much about Black Rock Shooter, but I know it’s highly popular in Japan and has made its way to the US. The premise of the story is interesting. Mankind was destroyed by machines, and only a few humans remain alive. Black Rock Shooter is mankind’s heroine, and you play that role in the game. There’s some shooting involved and minor exploration, but the game feels like a cheap cash tie-in for the franchise.

Exploration consists of wandering through extremely linear and ugly environments to find enemies to kill. When you get into battle, you are stationary and must use the analog nub to control your gun and press square to fire. As you continue to fire, your gun will overheat and do less damage. This is an interesting idea, so don’t spam shots. Enemies advance on you, and you need to block or use defensive special powers to reduce damage taken. There are many special powers to unlock, but they have long-cooled-down timers. This seems fun at first, but after the first few levels, it gets tiring. It’s really easy because you are given plenty of health packs, and it’s not hard to judge the enemy. Each battle plays exactly like this, even bosses.

When you’re not shooting, you’re just running around, and that’s the entire game. There’s no handing out stat points, and the story drags on and is pretty incoherent. I didn’t get attached to any of the characters, and I couldn’t even finish the game. The game has good Japanese voice acting, but the game is downright ugly, even for PSP standards. The textures are so low-resolution and muddy that you can hardly make out what they are. The models are ugly, with hardly any detail, and everything looks out of proportion. BRS is nearly taller than 5-story buildings, and all the environments look the same. There’s honestly not much fun here, even for hardcore BRS fans. They may trudge through it for the story, but that’s about it.

BRS could have been so much more given the license. Instead, we get an ugly, dull-shooter RPG hybrid that isn’t interesting at all to play. Why the game got a US release is beyond me, seeing as a lot of people have never heard of BRS and the game is so hard to find. There is a collector’s edition released in Japan, and it has done much better over there.