A man called Silius Italicus once said “In war we must be speedy”. I have no idea who this man was or what he did as a day job (aside from his quotation writing tendencies). But whatever the case, he certainly nailed this game on the head.

War. So important it demands its own sentence. Yet so stupid that it may be started for the most trivial reasons such as the colour of a person’s skin, a nation’s access to energy supplies or… the number of angles an entity is made up of?! In Blipskrieg it’s all three. Yup, those bitter rivals are at it again and once more I wonder: “Will there ever be peace between multicoloured circles and grey squares?”. Not while the squares have access to ‘ultimate power’ at least…

The gameplay is simple: drag your rotund commander through aerial views of mazes to an exit portal. And gather some of your allies while you’re at it. And maybe use them to take out forcefields, disable the occasional turret and blast up a few of those pesky squares. Promoted as a “Real-Time Strategy” game by developers Game Clay, either they don’t know what that means or they have a remarkable ability to stretch the truth. The winning ‘strategy’ is easy to describe: Blipzkrieg of course! Rush to get your troops, rush to attack the enemy and thus rush towards victory. Simple. Never has the ‘RUSH ATTACK!!’ been so overpowered. So yeah, it’s not much of a ‘Real-Time Strategy’ in the traditional sense of commanding troops in real-time. More of a ‘Real, Time-Strategy’ in that you are really learning how to strategically lower the time taken to get from A to B.

At least this makes the game more ‘pacey’ even if it sacrifices any element of planning to do so. And at least one (actually, just one: the second last) of the 29 levels does require a different strategy… clicking lots and lots on the troop spawner for 3 minutes while sitting in the same spot and then RUSH ATTACK!! Fun times.

Admittedly I did enjoy playing the game for the first 10 or so levels as the action is fast paced. Also the game looks and sounds very nice, successfully pulling off a techno theme complete with synth sound effects and music. Until it becomes highly repetitive that is. Maybe consider more than one music track. Or one that goes on for more than 2 and a half minutes before looping. Or even one that doesn’t consist of pretty much the same theme throughout. Just a thought…

The longevity leaves much to be desired too. You will RUSH ATTACK!! your way through this game in about 30 minutes. You can go back and try to improve your time on the levels but there isn’t even a leaderboard feature to make that in any way a worthwhile experience.

It’s a shame because I personally believe this game has a great concept behind it and could have been much better if a little more time was spent adding small yet important features like that or even just designing the levels in a slightly more inventive way. Perhaps rushing is not always the solution.

By all means, give the game a go though! It’s a quick and easy timekiller and certainly deserving of a look. You can play it right here.

And since I started with a quotation I feel like I should end with one too. “Read more of our blog” – Dogbert. Genius right there.

Rating: D