Thanks to 8-Bit Legit for the review code

Title: Project Blue
System: Xbox One
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 10/06/2023

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Story

In this new NES title, you take control of an experimental soldier codenamed Blue, who breaks out of his confinement and sets out to discover the secrets behind a mysterious organization! The scanned manual includes more of the backstory, but as per old games of the genre, Project Blue just lets you jump right into the action.

Presentation

Project Blue is a recent NES title, and like with Battle Kid, 8-Bit Legit has taken it and placed it into an emulator with minor game edits done to acknowledge the system button changes. Like that other port, there’s barely anything when it comes to options or bonus features outside of screen borders, and you cannot retain your selected border upon closing and reopening the game, making it a bit of a clunky process to do each and every time. Still, the in-game graphics look great with lots of background detail.

In much better news, the audio issues I noted with Battle Kid where the pitch would go wildly up and down is completely gone in this port of Project Blue: no matter how I paused or what I did, Blue’s journey would keep on sounding proper, making the audio emulation pretty good and what you would expect for a NES game like this. The in-game music is decent and gloomy, but nothing you’ll want to buy on CD. Still rather catchy, though. All in all, this port looks good even with limited display options, and the emulation of the sound is solid as well, making this a fine way to have the NES experience on your Xbox.

Gameplay

Project Blue is an action platformer, where the main goal is to traverse though several big areas as you guide Blue on his fierce journey to take out the Neo Corp Headquarters. You have a jump button and a shoot button, just like Mega Man and other similar action platformers, and that is as complex as the core controls get; most of this game is just testing your reflexes to their limits, and Project Blue manages to deliver that in an authentic, NES challenging fashion.

See, each area is split into several checkpoints, and you start off with a couple of lives, and due to your controls being fairly simple, each screen ends up acting like a mini arena to go through as you progress to the next one. Whether it requires defeating all of the enemies, dodging lasers, deactivating a trap, or finding a safe path out of the room before death, you do have quite a bit of work to accomplish before making it to the boss of the area.

Luckily, Blue has a health bar, so he isn’t a one-hit wonder, but you don’t start off with a full bar of health. Enemies drop refills often enough that if you keep up your dodging skills, you should be able to tank a few hits, and you can even find health extensions throughout the stages, though continuing will reset your health back to default. Dying will send you back to a checkpoint, which ends up often being a couple of screens back and not too taxing once you memorize the set of rooms, but continuing will send you back a lot further, to right around the start or middle of the area you’re in. Continuing at least on the normal mode appears to be infinite, so you can still push your way further and further into the game if you keep at it enough, and generally I did find the game’s challenges to be a fair, steady ramp up on the default difficulty.

With that said, the game doesn’t have any sort of password feature at all, so you have to finish this in one sitting due to the port not including any sort of save state feature. Oddly enough though, despite me knowing I was nowhere close to the end of the game when I called it for my play session (having made it 1/4 of the way through), the Xbox achievements for the game are surprisingly easy and I almost 100%ed em. Looking at the ones I didn’t get, it appears it doesn’t even offer anything for beating the final stages at all, nor the higher difficulties, so while there are achievements, they are unfortunately pretty basic and not something I’d consider as a significant bonus feature here.

Speaking of the other difficulties, there’s a harder difficulty, and an even tougher Brutal difficulty, which doesn’t make the enemies hit harder and call it a day, but rather redesigns the levels to be trickier and have new paths and completely different rooms, definitely spiking the challenge up significantly. The normal difficulty level is more than reasonable enough for me, but I gave brutal a shot and yep, it’s pretty crazy, making me feel like it took influence from the sort of challenges Battle Kid did.

The in-game manual does note that this brutal option can also be used to import custom layouts, but it seems that was more of a feature of the full NES Kickstarter release and not something you can do in this port at all, as it requires a separate level editor program that I couldn’t seem to find in this package at all. A bit of a bummer that bonus wasn’t included, but the three difficulties are more than enough challenge to keep hardcore platforming fans entertained.

Conclusion

Overall, Project Blue is a much better porting effort compared to the Battle Kid port from a few months ago. The feature set is still incredibly thin and simplistic, but the audio is accurate now and the controls feel reasonably responsive, leading to this NES game being a fun, if simple time.

Unfortunately, with nothing in terms of an in-game password feature or save states, you will have to do this all in one sitting like the old days, and while I managed to make a pretty decent effort thanks to the generous continues letting you try and try again, this is definitely a throwback platformer with a bit of a learning curve to it. Solid action platforming fun, but definitely would have been a bit of a softer blow if it had some sort of password feature, and for the price, you are supporting a fun NES indie with a solid port, but I still wish there were at least more bonuses or QOL stuff for the asking price. At the very least, some sort of access to level editor content or the level editor itself would have been appreciated.

I give Project Blue a 6 out of 10.