Hero shooters are the current hotness, so it was only a matter of time before someone finally made a competent attempt at doing it in Virtual Reality. Japanese developer MyDearest looks to switch up the 3v3 Hero shooter genre by adding some Smash Bros elements, but does this deliver a unique enough experience to sell to an already admittedly limited market? Brazen Blaze is essentially Overwatch, but in VR, and with characters that aren’t insufferable, so that’s a step in the right direction.
Brazen Blaze
Developer: MyDearest
Publisher: MyDearest
Platforms: Windows PC, Meta Quest (reviewed)
Release Date: July 18, 2024
Price: $14.99
The President of the World is chosen by their strength, which means the entirety of the story of Brazen Blaze is that these people are fighting to get to see who gets to be President.
It doesn’t matter though, there’s literally nothing else to the story but a single sentence tagline right now, so maybe in future development there might be an arcade mode or something that tells what happens if each character “wins” the battle.
Brazen Blaze is visually appealing. The characters are all pretty/handsome, they all have a unique style/look, and there’s a bunch of punk rock style scattered graffiti and defacing going on in the menus and splash art.
Battle takes place in an industrial cityscape version of Paris (that looks more like a 1800’s England), but the environment is fully destructible (aside from the floor) so you can punch and slice your way through buildings to find your enemies. Battles are 3v3, and the hook for Brazen Blaze is that once you’re out of health, you’re stunned in place.
Once stunned, you either need to be revived by a teammate or the enemy team needs to hit you with a melee strike which will eliminate you, send you flying off the stage where you’ll hover on a platform above the arena to spectate for the rest of the round.
Combat is pretty straight forward. Every “runner” has a normal weapon, a selectable sub-weapon, and there are random items that spawn on the map that you can use to your advantage in a sticky situation or to increase your domination. One of my favorite sub-weapons was the side arm that fires homing bullets, which was great for doing chip damage against runners who excel in close combat or are more highly mobile.
Runners like Legacy or Skybolt are far more likely to stay grounded, while Levin and Riot are better served by staying mobile and swooping in for quick strikes. While there’s a limited number of runners available, picking runners that complement each other is the key to success. If your team picks Riot for aggression and Legacy for tanking/drawing fire, go for Sunshine or Chillout to provide solid ranged/utility damage.
The gameplay is fast paced and frantic, and it’s honestly a lot of fun but it’s got some quirks that kept me from enjoying it to the fullest. One massive problem with VR as a whole is that there’s still not a good tracking system for the in-game camera to match up to what you’re actually looking at.
This means while dashing around the city and keeping yourself protected in combat, you’re often tasked to frantically click and flick the right analog stick to make sure you’re able to see threats coming from all directions.
My brain gets overstimulated trying to simultaneously move and look with my eyes while also trying to either retreat or fight back, so I often preferred to stick with mid to long-range characters to have the most fun. I played a lot of Skybolt for this reason, but Chillout is a lot of fun as well.
Another big problem I have with the control scheme is that you dash in the direction you’re facing, not in the direction you’re looking – which means when rushing to smash someone who’s stunned, more often than not I’d slightly dash to their side and miss because I wasn’t quite turned enough to make contact.
Not letting me remap the dash buttons feels like a major oversight as well, as I’d greatly prefer having the melee dash on a stick click than on a trigger where I might actually hit it while trying to alternate between squaring up to aim or quickly throwing my gun down to gain mobility. Skill issue, I know, but the option would have been greatly preferred.
Finally, my last issue with Brazen Blaze is the cost model. The $15 price tag is low enough to encourage an impulse purchase, but unless you purchase the runner passes, you’re going to have grind a lot in order to permanently unlock the runners as their passes arrive.
On top of that, there’s also additional skins and other goodies that you can buy in-game currency with real money to buy, and for some reason the emotes are consumables so there’s pretty much zero reason to ever use them.
Sprays are probably one of the most annoying things about other Hero shooters like Team- Fortress 2 or Overwatch 2, but there’s a large audience that loves to spam them, so it’s a head-scratcher of an idea to limit their usage.
Overall, Brazen Blaze is an exceptionally fun game even with the limited amount of content it currently contains. However, they really should consider making the game free to play since the runner passes are almost a requirement to make any sort of acceptable amount of progress in unlocking things.
It was worse when I first started playing, and thankfully it was patched so you now gain experience for matches played (before it was a once per day type situation where you’d have to play daily in order to make progress on the pass) but even then it’s pretty slow.
There’s also not a very big player base, despite having a pretty active Discord server that’s full of rabid fans, and it’s primarily all Meta players because it’s never had more than 19 players on Steam, which is a shame.
Still, if the entry price barrier is dropped, I think there’s some hope that this game will survive and grow. It’s just hard to gauge how well a VR game will catch on, but this one is worth checking out if you have a VR headset – just maybe wait to see if they drop the barrier of entry.
Brazen Blaze was reviewed on a Meta Quest 3 using a copy provided by MyDearest. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Brazen Blaze is now available for Windows PC (via Steam), and Meta (via the Quest Store).
