Blinx: The Time Sweeper (Xbox)
When Microsoft joined the console race, many were curious if it would have a mascot like the other major names. Nintendo had Mario, Sega had Sonic, and for a while, PlayStation had Crash Bandicoot, but before the helmet of Halo’s Master Chief solidified as the face of Xbox, some were curious if a little cat named Blinx might fill the role. Developed partially as a way to ingratiate the Xbox brand with the mascot-loving people of Japan, it wasn’t too far a stretch to think he was at least being poised to be a star, but Blinx came and went as Xbox focused on more mature branding and franchises. That does raise the question though if Blinx: The Time Sweeper did ever have a shot of propelling its protagonist to worldwide recognition, and with its 3D platforming having a time bending gimmick, it does at least sound like it had a shot of standing out from the other platforms’ mascots.
In the world of Blinx: The Time Sweeper, time is a resource that is manufactured and managed at the Time Factory that connects to many worlds. When the flow of time is disrupted in a world, it crystallizes and eventually combine with other crystals into dangerous monsters. A gang of pigs called the Tom-Tom Gang aim to pilfer these crystals for use in their trouble-making activities, but they have destablized World B1Q64 to the point the Time Factory feels it necessary to disconnect it from the others before it can collapse and damage the factory with it. However, Blinx, one of many nearly identical feline time sweepers who normally sort out the time crystal manifestations, sees that the Tom-Tom Gang has also kidnapped the young human princess Lena and is quickly smitten, running to World B1Q64 to see if he can save it before it is too far gone. Almost all of this set-up will disappear from relevancy for some time, the Tom-Tom Gang a fairly minor factor in your time sweeping work with the monsters and crystals being the biggest focus. You might see a pig pop in and peek at you for a bit or experience the rare encounter where you fight with the boss Benito not in a proper fight but in a quick attempt to grab gold before he can, although the final fight at least ties things back to the princess and plot to send things off with a fairly cute end note.
In Blinx: The Time Sweeper, the main concern of a level is clearing out all the monsters, the level exit only opening when you have done so. To defeat the time monsters, you’ll need to make use of Blinx’s time sweeper, a tool with a few functions. The most practical will be the fact it functions a bit like a vacuum cleaner, able to suck up objects or even suck in useful items that are just out of reach, albeit with a fairly short range. Things get a little more fantastical thanks to the fact the sweeper can store the objects for later and with the proper upgrades, there’s very little limit on how big the object can be and there’s quite a bit of storage space within the sweeper itself. This is vital because Blinx’s main means of attack his foes is firing the objects he’s found at them, some objects like bombs having a blast radius while really large objects can take out more of an enemy’s health. A bit unfortunately though, aiming your shots isn’t always the cleanest. While there’s a bit of assistance if you’re aiming at something clearly in front of you to keep it on track, sometimes the object might hitch on a small lip of flooring, or the object won’t deal damage since it didn’t hit the foe square on thanks to the occasional difficulty in lining things up just right. Blinx: The Time Sweeper can place you in small rooms with a lot of enemies that can make pointing Blinx in the proper direction a bit rough, especially since if an object misses it will land on the ground and be a barrier to a next shot, vacuuming things back up not something you always have time to do in a scuffle. Stages do often at least have a lot of objects or maybe a foe or two that can fire some at you so you can build up a reserve or still fight even if all your fired items went flying off an edge, but the imprecise elements let down an otherwise nearly functional system that encourages you to poke around a bit for objects to fire.
Blinx’s movement is generally clean even if it’s not always great for lining up the trickier shots, and while he can feel like his walk is a bit slow in the larger stages, he has a nice flexible double jump that gives you good control over his aerial mobility and sometimes can be used cleverly to skip past an intended obstacle. If the double jump was his only movement tool he’d have what he needs for boss fights, level exploration, and navigation of levels both tall or cluttered, but some situations do strain your maneuvering because of a few unnecessary touches. Blinx can also do a backflip or a cartwheel to the side if you press the stick in the associated direction as you press A. These are almost always inferior options to just jumping, proving to be harder to control and not even getting the same height as a double jump, and even though the cartwheel sounds like a dodge, you can cover the same distance with a jump to the side that would be more useful. These alternate moves are more likely to arise by accident than intent due to being fairly useless, and when they do, they can interrupt what you were actually intending to do. As mentioned, some areas crowd the enemies in tight and trying to maneuver around the space without getting hit would involve some smart jumping that gets foiled by the accidental slow backflips that leave you easy pickings. Much like the sweeper aiming, this is the kind of issue that you can spend a long time not encountering at all until suddenly it messes things up, some levels likely not to hit on either of these issues.
However, the defining mechanic of Blinx: The Time Sweeper as you might imagine is his ability to control time. Using skills inspired by the options you might have when using a VCR, Blinx can slow time, stop time, rewind, fast-forward, and even record, these manifesting in a few different ways than what their straightforward names might imply. Slow and stop are exactly as described, for a set period of time the whole world around Blinx will either slow down or come to a halt, allowing you to overcome tricky obstacles like swinging blades or rolling bombs while also allowing you to attack enemies when they cannot even fight back. Rewind somewhat does what it promises, but it also has specific objects in the world that it influences like a crumbling bridge or collapsing pillar that will still rewind even if they fell apart a fair bit ago so you can use them properly. Fast-forward does speed up the world around Blinx, but it also gives him a shield of invincibility, although if that shield takes a hit, the fast-forward ends. Record gives complete invincibility though, under the condition that for the next few seconds you are actually setting the actions your duplicate will take who you can then collaborate with to solve a few small puzzles. The extent to which these powers are used or are useful varies though. Record’s primarily use is to have the copy of Blinx stand on a switch or launch you by standing on the other side of a seesaw, although it can have interesting applications in boss fights since it lets you attempt an attack with low risk. Rewind sounds interesting on the surface for reverting the level state, but it is also a bit misused, like having the ground crumble too quickly under you so you can end up taking painful falls or drop to lower levels in large stages just so the game can then have you rewind it to fix it on second visit. Fast-forward sees almost no puzzle usage however, especially since it doesn’t mean Blinx can walk on spikes or anything and the dangers it could have helped you avoid are even faster instead. Stop and Slow become the standbys because they’re flexible and can even remove the need for things like Rewind if used at the right time, but there’s another condition applied to all this time control business that makes things less clean.
The time crystals that are part of the plot are what powers the sweeper to do its time altering trickery. To be able to use a power, you must first collect time crystals to bank the powers, but it’s not as easy as it may sound. Each power has an associated crystal color, and to gain one charge for that power, you must collect four crystals, three of which must be the right color. If you have an incompatible mix, all the crystals you picked up are wiped away and there are limited crystals in a level, although usually the game will put crystals that are needed for an interaction nearby or have monsters in the area lean towards producing the crystal type you need. The crystals the monsters drop are not, however, guaranteed to be the type you might want, the randomization certainly a barrier to time power use before you even consider that you can only carry a few powers at one time. Powers with niche uses become burdens because they take up limited space in your sweeper while trying to grab the crystals you need can be complicated by them being placed closed together or not even coming in enough numbers to make grabbing the power easy, and then the health complicates things even further. To heal in Blinx: The Time Sweeper, you need to collect heart crystals, these adding to a pool of six potential crystal colors that can pop out of a foe and not necessarily in matching sets. The health is also technically a Retry, for when Blinx takes damage, the world rewinds a few seconds and throws you back into the action. Most of the time it can detect the last truly safe moment before you were hurt, but it can throw you back into danger or the middle of a jump too, which can lead to losing another Retry and watching the slow rewind again. Dying completely in a level forces a full stage reset, but on the bright side, the game’s first level is very short and collecting the Stop power there is very easy if you do ever need to bank some of the most useful time power for the game’s toughest parts.
A last little complication to everything comes in the form of a level’s timer. Each stage in Blinx: The Time Sweeper must be beat in under ten minutes, with only a bit of leeway granted by the fact that a rewind or Retry will roll back the clock a little. When first playing a new level this can be a bit of a concern, especially if you’re grabbing all the gold you can for those useful upgrades in the shop or looking for the cat medals. Cat medals, while sometimes placed behind a decent platforming or time power challenge, are common collectibles but ones with some pretty poor rewards. Periodically you’ll get prizes for reaching a certain amount of medals only to see underwhelming scenes of the Tom-Tom Gang posing like circus performers, and it’s easy to get disheartened when these comprise the first six prizes you get. There are 80 medals in total and you only start getting decent prizes when you have over half of them, and even then it is mostly concept art, but at least the ability to skip them means they’re more there for the thrill of the hunt than something worthwhile you’d feel foolish for skipping. If you don’t get caught up in getting cat medals, most stages are more than manageable in the time limit, at least until you reach the game’s last stretch. The final two worlds as well as the end boss are a large jump in difficulty, especially since Everwinter, the seventh world, introduces ice physics and is where you start seeing more of the deliberate rewind traps. The end boss in particular also feels a touch cruel, having you face a gauntlet of four of the other bosses that can be difficult in their own right before you get a chance to even face him and his own time trickery, only to have to do it all again should you fail.
A lot can get in the way of enjoying Blinx: The Time Sweeper, but at least a good deal of it is either near the back of the experience, can be overcome with some grit, or rarely occurs. Before the game starts stressing its systems and exposes their flaws, the early levels can be decent romps. Each world has three levels and a boss fight save for the final one, and at first the early stages go for a bit of an urban theme. Blinx travels through a town’s alleys and streets before finding himself in the Venice-inspired Deja Vu Canals, but even before then levels can shake things up by having you take rooftops instead of roads. You’ll eventually find yourselves in mines, that nasty ice world Everwinter, and some difficult factory stages, many levels making good use of space since there is often a clear way forward but ways to see what’s ahead or double back without having to back track entirely. Vertical levels can suffer from the pain of a long drop, Rewind sadly not undoing the fall and Retry can only bail you out if you time an immediate death after well, but there is a decent sense of exploration and adventure in many of the levels as you hunt down monsters, use a time power or two to grab a medal or overcome an obstacle, and then exit the level. At times, it’s almost best to treat it as if Slow and Stop are your only real powers with the others being temporary bonuses. While crystal collecting will be a bit of a drag even with specialization, especially due to its inherently wasteful nature at times since you can’t eject any you’ve gathered accidentally, you can better treat Blinx as a platformer first and one with time powers only for brief moments where it can ease up a challenge or overcome a very specific obstacle.
Some bosses in Blinx: The Time Sweeper, unfortunately, will be long and slow fights regardless of how you approach them, especially since they have periods of invulnerability so you can’t use time powers to beat them too easily. There are repeat bosses too, although at least with new complications so it’s not the same fight. Enemies in general in Blinx: The Time Sweeper can often feel like they survive too long, another element that works fine before the game ups the difficult considerably for the final two worlds, but they can sometimes require thoughtful attacks rather than just nailing them repeatedly with objects. A foe that eats the objects you fire at its face will need to be approached from the right angle or the hopping spiky balls that roll towards you must be first baited into missing before they become vulnerable, although when they do get the health boost in later stages, doing it repeatedly does become a bother. Like most parts of the experience before you reach Everwinter, the enemies fill their role well but can’t survive contact with the game cramming too much into one space since its systems are not honed enough to handle that pressure.
THE VERDICT: Blinx: The Time Sweeper starts off a decent platformer about searching the corners of condensed but interesting 3D spaces for monsters, gold, and extras, your time powers sometimes adding a twist while firing objects you found about as attacks adds to that rewarding exploration. When the game starts trying to be more challenging though, it buckles under the limits and rough edges of its systems. The time crystal system is sloppy, object firing and extra jump options are strained by movement demands or available space, and unfortunate limits like the ten minute timer all come together to make the last few stages and bosses brutal. The frustrations do pile up near the end despite a few creative and interesting challenges to be found, but thankfully most of the adventure, while not always creative, still can provide effective platforming before its flaws are exposed under lategame pressure.
And so, I give Blinx: The Time Sweeper for Xbox…
An OKAY rating. Blinx: The Time Sweeper is not a good game undone by its rough backend, it is a mostly decent game that eventually fumbles its efforts to increase the game difficulty. Areas in Everwinter would be difficult enough without the slippery ground thanks to sturdy enemies, crumbling ground, and tight spaces, but then it gets needlessly cute and makes it so if you walk too much in one direction Blinx will slip because he was “running” too fast. Blinx generally feels a little slow which makes that slip almost insulting, but this means you jump more to prevent the slip and sometimes do those pointless back flips, and then the ice may just crumble under you still. It escalates in a way the game wasn’t really built for and thankfully it does pull back on the less fair parts of the concept, but even a well-designed lategame challenge is let down by how aiming your object firing is a bit imprecise and items are limited to some degree. This is why Blinx: The Time Sweeper works best in the earlier stages where the hunt is more important than the fights and time usage. It does mean earlier stages only really whip out Record or the like for simple puzzles, but when starting out, you can find Slow and Stop useful tools but ones that don’t overwhelm the gameplay because you can’t really carry many powers at once or refill them too often before you get the upgrades. The crystal system in general feels like it needs a rework, limits still important to avoid trivializing danger but random elements and limited chances to grab what you even need are unnecessary roadbumps to experiencing stages. The Retry way of healing is also poorly thought out, the game trying to be cute again but instead making injury more frustrating since it is slow to recover from and unreliable at times. It’s hard not to focus on how things unravel near the end though, and not every part of the later stages is a drag, but the adventure before then can only do so much on its own. Some really simple changes could lean into letting you embrace the game’s entertaining exploration or feel more willing to use a time power for a nifty edge rather than mostly at required spots, but much like with its weak prizes for collecting medals, Blinx: The Time Sweeper doesn’t ultimately reward you for the hard work, making it hard to recommend.
Even if Halo hadn’t stolen its thunder and determined Xbox’s course, Blinx probably didn’t have what it takes to support the brand. A lot works on the surface, and a good chunk of the game is based around spaces that work fairly well for navigation and exploration, but you can’t have the later parts of the adventure lay bare your issues so flagrantly and expect to be the face of a game system. Blinx: The Time Sweeper can have a fun soundtrack, some occasionally interesting time puzzles, and levels with a good mix of themes and dangers, but when certain systems sabotage the action at times and get even rougher when under high pressure, the little nuisances become reasons you want to stop playing with Blinx. Even those better parts before things start to crack can only do so much to alleviate the unfortunate realities of how this game chose to realize its time and movement mechanics.