Blindfire early access impressions — Taking a shot in the dark

Let’s be honest, the FPS genre can be a little… boring. Not that it’s bad, but it’s easy to play a new one and find it devoid of anything fresh. It’s an issue that faces many games, but shooters can be the worst offender. When I first saw the trailer for Blindfire, I had no idea what it did differently. But, that’s because its unique concept just doesn’t trailer well.

Blindfire is a game where you literally take a shot in the dark. The idea is simple: what if you couldn’t really see your opponent? It’s a pretty standard first-person shooter at its core, but with a single life and a lot of shadows. You drop into an arena covered in darkness. Any sightlines available are similar to the brightness adjustment squares you’re asked to manipulate when you begin a video game to make sure your brightness is correct. You know, that one in the middle that they want the icon barely visible; that’s how well you can see. Even with your environment somewhat in view, your foes are not, which leads to an interesting game of cat and mouse.

Before I get ahead of myself, there are two ways you play Blindfire. One is a standard free-for-all match called Bodycount where eight players fight for domination. The second is team style, with two teams of four headbutting each other for victory. Both of these modes are limited lives, meaning if you die in a round, you’re out until the next one begins. Each mode also goes on for five rounds total, giving everyone equal opportunity to rack up the kills and try to be the best, either as an individual or a squad.

As mentioned above, you drop into near complete darkness when you play Blindfire. You can make out a bit of your surroundings, at least the stairs, walls, and other obstructions or objects on the map. After all, you have to be able to have some idea of where you are to make any sort of movement viable. This blending of what is visible and what isn’t is a good choice, allowing the idea to work without stripping your vision completely away.

When you engage, that’s when everything gets chaotic. There are only two guns, a double barrel shotgun and a pistol. These randomly swap between rounds, and those two weapons prevent players from spamming, say, a full-auto rifle to get a kill. Instead, you’ll move around and need to be more precise in your shots to take down your invisible foe. The gunplay feels pretty tight so far, although I wonder how much of that is due to me not being able to see half of what’s going on.

Your best friend – and foe – in the dark is sound. There’s a meter on the bottom right of your HUD so you can tell how loud you’re being, and you’ll want to be very careful as you move around the map to not give away a cue that gets you killed. Double 11’s design is good enough to tell your enemy’s position when you can’t see them, and there are different cues to let you know for instance if they’re on a set of stairs compared to the floor. Reloading is also tricky; you can choose to go for speed and give away your position, or take a chance and go slow in order to disappear. Firing your gun also reveals your location in more than one way: gunshot sound and flare of light from your gun barrel. In a game where position is king, both of those can put you at a disadvantage, so be sure of yourself before you pull the trigger.

I think the craziest part of playing a round is the panic that ensues. You’re trying your best to track other people who have no idea where you are either. Once the fights begin, it’s hard for it to not devolve into people wildly shooting into the black. You do have an echo ability on a cooldown that will give you a quick blip of an opponent’s outline, but in most of my gunfights I didn’t have the time to act on it. Sometimes it really just boils down to who got lucky, like I did several times when accidentally hitting an explosive barrel, killing someone I missed initially.

Speaking of explosive barrels, each arena has several traps. There’s a catch to these, however, you have to be dead to use them. I have my qualms with the system, but it’s a cool idea. Being able to shine a bit of extra light on someone, activate a mannequin’s gun to fire a few blanks off; all cool ways to screw over the guy who killed you. The arena will eventually start to brighten as the round’s timer winds down, so be careful where you sit at the end. Also, don’t sit, as Blindfire will activate a camping function on you and reveal you a bit via a light on your gun.

My issues with the death cam stems from one thing: you can really abuse it. In the free-for-all mode you can see everyone, which makes sense, but you can also join a match with other friends in your lobby. That meant I could tell my brother who was playing with me at the time the exact positions of other players when I was dead, not to mention activate traps to assist him with finding their locations. Team Bodycount has its own issue in that you can yet again see the entire enemy team. The trap concept is neat, but the ability to be told where an enemy is by a teammate hurts the competitive nature of Blindfire.

Overall, I think this is a really awesome idea. Shooting at other players you can’t see and having to rely on your other senses is an ace concept, and something different among the masses of similar first-person shooters. How Blindfire evolves from this will be telling, and if they can convince people to stick around without a deep leveling system. Blindfire is available now in early access on PC and Xbox Series consoles, with PS5 coming at a later date.

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