Welcome Time Wasters!
This week while searching the internet for games to play I stumbled across one called Bloom. The summary of Bloom describes it as a ‘post-apocalypse flower picking rocket game.’ With a description like that I couldn’t resist playing this game.
As mentioned above, Bloom takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting. The whole point of the game is to escape a destroyed city in a rocket ship while collecting white flowers along the way. There isn’t much in the way of story to describe why the world is in ruin, but the flowers that are picked grow off of dead corpses that are placed along the levels.
Bloom has elements of a vertical shooter, minus the shooting. Players control the ship with the arrow keys, but can only move it left and right. Not being able to move up and down really limited this game. Instead of feeling engaged in the game it felt like I was running on auto pilot the whole time I was playing it. It also doesn’t help that the rocket ship is incredibly slow. One would think that something meant to break Earth’s gravity could go a little faster than a Sunday driver, but this isn’t the case.
Players can collect 10 of the white flowers that randomly appear in the game to get an extra life. The only problem with this is that the flowers don’t spawn very often, which means missing a single patch may make it impossible for players to get an extra life on that stage. I feel like this mechanic needed to be tweaked to include more flowers or it could have been removed completely.
As players progress through the game the levels will get more difficult (pretty standard stuff here), but the increase in difficulty is next to none. Additions like dead ends and moving obstacles don’t really add much to the game. This is because the pace of the game is so slow that almost nothing really feels like a threat. The only level that gave me a problem was one that introduced guns, and I died more to faulty mechanics than anything else. The guns have a red circle around them that represents their fire range, expect it doesn’t. These red circles mean absolutely nothing. Turrets will shoot at the player’s ship as soon as it comes in sight. This might not have been so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that only being able to move left and right makes it impossible to dodge a shot that it fired at the player along a horizontal plane.
Graphics in Bloom aren’t bad, but they definitely aren’t anything worthy of praise. The world is really bland and void of life. Yes I know, this is a post-apocalyptic game, but the repetitive backgrounds were all too obvious and the corpses with flowers on them didn’t appear enough to add a variety to the game’s environment. The rocket ship doesn’t look bad and the smoke trail that follows it is well animated.
Audio in Bloom is horrible. The constant rumble of the rocket ship becomes boring to listen to real quick and yet again, flowers appear so little that the pinging sound from picking them up doesn’t invade the game very often. The music in the game isn’t entertaining to listen to either, but honestly, I don’t know if a low rumble that slightly changes pitch every so often can really be considered music.
Bloom feels like it was made by a high school or college student for a class project, but they ran out of time and turned it in half finished. If this is the case, then it should have never been uploaded to the internet without having first been completed. Gameplay is very limited and the story is almost nonexistent. The slow pace and lack of interesting audio and visuals makes the game get very boring very quickly.
Bloom earns 1.5 GiN Gems out of 5.