Neon Blight Review

Neon Blight was created by Bleeding Tapes, an indie developer studio. This puts you in the position of a former cop and gun store owner in an underground ghetto. In theory, you are looking for revenge against the crime boss that destroyed your professional career while pursuing a new career within the black-market retail sector.

Everything You Need to Know Before Playing Neon Blight

• Lore of the Game
• Gameplay
• Graphics
• Sound Design
• Bugs and Glitches
• Is it worth playing?

Neon Blight

€4,99

from

What is the Lore of Neon Blight?

In the cyberpunk world of Eden, you are responsible for providing the weapons and equipment necessary to help the cyberpunks of Neon Blight defeat the mega-corporations. You will become the cyberpunk gun shop owner. It's your job to provide weapons and equipment for the cyberpunks in your time. You will be able operate your gun shop and fight seemingly endless waves if enemies.

You will also have the ability to acquire the ultimate weapon by navigating the Outer Border and the multitude of enemies that are trying to stop you from reaching your ultimate goal. To learn more about the details of the story, check out our Neon Blight Story article.

Gameplay

The loop in Neon Blight has a simple structure: move to the next sub-section, shoot enemies and loot. It's good when it works. It can feel artificially conservative, especially when you have to climb the ladder to improve the shop or chase the boss. You feel like you should be doing some sort of thing in these locations or at least introducing yourselves to your neighbors, but there are no tutorial interactions with other NPCs within the hub. A worse situation is created by the insufficient drops.

Although you might be able to get some coins or a weapon you could also get some money, more often than not, you are left with nothing. Further frustration is caused by the inability to find information on replenishing ammo stock for weapons that are not standard but serviceable starting pistols. All this makes it difficult to start a profitable business and even worse, to earn a good reputation.

Graphics

Neon Blight is very well designed graphically as it opts for a low-fi 8-bit aesthetic. While character animations can be smooth, they tend to get hung on inconspicuous corners in the environment. The map areas are clearly identifiable enough to be consistent with the theme the larger sector is supposed to encompass, but very little of it really feels like it belongs in a cyberpunk setting. Bullets come in a color-coded format so that it's easy to identify what you're sending, and what's coming, but there's no overwhelming number of special effects.

There are some silly animations for the swinging gun arms, but they're not too distracting. While the snowfields, deserts, forests and other natural environments look great, they aren't as close as the promised cyberpunk game mechanics.

Sound Design

The music is often absent or so incoherent that you forget about it, which allows you to focus on the sound effects. They're not very good. Your footsteps are too loud and constant, while gunshots and grunts are fine. I hated hearing that snow-crunch footstep sound while I was walking around the map. The echoing metal footstep sound in bio-tech lab is also really irritating.

Bugs and Glitches

Now it's time for me to mention that the game is also a buggy mess. This is the kind of thing that I would expect to find in an early access preview game, not a title with a release date in just a few days. It was so full of bugs and errors that I would love to list it, but it is humanly impossible.

Is Neon Blight Worth Playing?

One thing that I find most striking about Neon Blight, is its annoying. Each of its problems adds up to all the others. Taking a look at the list of bugs, if you could fix all of them, it would objectively make a good game but it feels impossible to fix them all at this rate. If you want to play Neon Blight, I would advise you to wait until few more fixes and patches have been released.