Blackout City, Thick Policy’s unique arcade game where you drive a car over the lit sections of all the roads in a city to blackout the city, is now available from the app store. Although Blackout City is built on a good concept and makes good use of accelerometer controls, the repetitive gameplay and lack of excitement prevent it from being a great game.
Blackout City Pros:
- Unique game and concept
- Getting lightbulbs in levels provides a bit of replay value
- Good accelerometer controls
Blackout City Cons:
- Very repetitive gameplay
- Levels are too easy
- Needs other control options
- Backgrounds interfere with gameplay at times
Each level in Blackout City has 3 levels of roads that are brightly lit at the beginning of the level. Your goal is to drive a car over the lit sections of the roads to successfully drain all the power and blackout the entire city. However, there are other cars that get in your way or relight the roads. In order to get rid of the other cars, you have to shoot them with bullets, which are scattered throughout the level. To drive the car left or right, you simply tilt your iPhone. There are buttons at the bottom of the screen to shoot or jump. In every level, there are 3 lightbulbs and many keys that you can collect to boost your score. We were impressed with the concept of the game, as there aren’t many iPhone games with completely unique gameplay. There are 5 cities that need to be blacked out, and each city has 5 stages, providing 25 levels.
The graphics in Blackout City are appropriate for the game, but get annoying at times. Thick Policy uses unique landmarks from each of the 5 cities to compose the background of each level, such as casinos for Las Vegas and Hollywood for Los Angeles. However, some of these backgrounds interfere with the game, and you cannot see some of the other cars clearly because of it.
Blackout City currently lacks a lot of the depth that composes a good iPhone game. The entire game is too easy, and once you learn how to play it, you won’t have any trouble beating each of the 25 levels. The levels are also extremely repetitive and most of them look the same with different backgrounds. Although the accelerometer controls are good and easy to use, Thick Policy really needs to implement another way to play the game, as the tilt controls get annoying and difficult sometimes. While Blackout City is still a decent game, it really does not meet a lot of gaming standards at this point.
Even though there are 25 levels in Blackout City, the repetitive nature of the game really hurts its replay value. After learning how to play, we had no trouble completing the game. Unfortunately, the game’s promise of a “surprise” if 3 lightbulbs are obtained in each level add little replay value to the game. For $0.99, this 3-Dimple casual game has a lot of potential but currently does not offer much fun.
