Blinx: The Time Sweeper/Review - daytrum - the technology guide for families

Publisher: Microsoft, www.microsoft.com

Ages: seven and up.

Parental Advisory:
Rough sports action
with bad sportmanship.

He's a cute cartoon character and he's on the Xbox. But while Microsoft's Blinx: The Time Sweeper offers an appealing character that can travel through time, the 3D platform title offers frustrating gameplay. There may be enough here to engage the kids that Blinx is designed to appeal to, but Blinx: The Time Sweeper is something of a disappointment.

As Blinx, a cute cat who works as a janitor in a time factory, you have to collect time crystals using the TS-1000 TimeSweeper, a fancy vacuum cleaner, and rescue a damsel in distress. The game serves some 30 levels that include underground caverns, abandoned mines, snowy regions, watery canals, and more. You have ten minutes to finish each level by defeating a certain number of enemies and reaching the level's goal. To complete each level, Blinx jumps, shoots garbage at enemies, and gathers gold and time crystals.

With the right time crystals, Blinx can change time in various ways: throwing the world into reverse or fast-forward to uncover secret areas and better deal with obstacles and challenges; pausing the game to freeze enemies and grab crystals without hassle; recording a second Blinxe to help perform a task, and engaging slo-mo to slow down the world so Blinx can sneak by enemies.

While the game's time travel angle is intriguing, gathering crystals in the correct, rather convoluted, order makes the game unnecessarily difficult and frustrating, and requires you to play levels over and over. The graphics in the game are first rate and Blinx himself looks great. Violence in the game consist of typical platform fighting.

While Blinx: The Time Sweeper provides the Xbox with its own cute character-a game mascot that can potentially be to the Xbox what Mario is to the Nintendo-Blinx's game, while promising, is not that much fun to play.

1/14/03 daytrum Editorial Staff