Blankos Block Party (the Block stands for Blockchain) was a Minigame based Party game with NFT's, that exclusively released on the Epic Games Store. That sentence in itself already explains why the game failed horribly. Making a game Epic exclusive is already highly controversial, but to put NFTs on top of it, is a death sentence. Not even the best team of doctors could save such a game. The developers Mythical Games, explained the move for the Epic Game Store, with wanting to use the "chance to reach Epic’s 180 million players who have interacted with the store". Towards the end, they didn't even reach 180 people or even 18 for that matter.
But that doesn't tell us anything about the actual quality of the game. Was it a real loss or just a forgettable misstep? Blankos Block Party has often been called 'Fall Guys, but with NFTs'. I would somewhat disagree with this comparison, since Blankos was gameplaywise actually more similar to games like Roblox. Fall Guys is a big Battle Royale game with different minigame rounds, while Blankos was instead a party game with various individual minigames. Players could win these individual stages, but they didn't gain more than a bit of XP as a reward and there was no overall champion after multiple rounds. The exception was the later introduced 'Blanko Brawl' LTM, which actually did seem to copy Fall Guys. And visually I can totally understand the comparison between Blankos and Fall Guys as well.
Same as Roblox, there was a big focus on players creating their own stages and adding them to the matchmaking pool. We did get such a feature for Fall Guys too, a couple of years after its release, but it isn't the main focus of the game, such as in Roblox and Blankos. There were essentially 3 different kind of stages in Blankos. There were racing stages, in which players had to try to be the first to run and jump to the finish line. In Combat stages players had to shoot and eliminate each other. The third type of stages were vibe collection levels, in which players had to collect the most items within a time limit. These type of stages are not bad, but also not something we haven't seen in Roblox, Core, Crayta or Fall Guys either. Players could bring in a bit of variation, when they created their own stages. That being said it still stayed somewhat within these 3 prototypes of stages, which is more limiting than Roblox and others, which had a near infinite variety of stages.
Where I need to give Blankos Block Party credit is the open world hub area, which acted as a kind of traversable main menu. We have also seen this in some other games, but it was nicely done in Blankos Block Party. There were different connected sky islands the players could traverse to and explore, while waiting to match up with other players.
So let's talk a bit about skins and NFTs in this game. Skins were sold in the form of Blankos, which were also a kind of digital collectible. The game even displayed them in little boxes, like real life children toys. This was obviously done to incentivise players to collect as many as possible. There were however two main differences between these Blanko NFTs and regular skins in other games.
For one, all Blankos in the game could be sold and purchased on the NFT Marketplace. This is for example, why some players purchased the Battle Passes and grinded them, so they would get the hard to reach Blankos and could sell them for a fortune on the marketplace. That was at least the wish of these players. I nearly pity them. Some of them most have grinded for many, many hours, because they thought these Blankos would eventually become very valuable, as soon as the game becomes popular. Sadly for them this never happened and in 2023 there were barely any players left, so nobody would purchase these "valuable" skins.
Fun Fact: Blankos Block Party shutdown its servers after 1 year of "Early Access" and around 1 year of full release in December 2023. Yet, there are still people trying to sell their Blankos for around 250 Dollars in the marketplace in early 2024. You might be saying "This is crazy" and it totally is. The idea is that you can use the skins of the failed Blankos Block Party PC-Game in the upcoming Blankos Mobile Game. PC-Players were too smart to invest in NFTs, but maybe they can get the mobile crowd. Btw, there were only 3 days between the announcement of the shutdown of Blankos Block Party and the actual server closure. Probably, because the devs knew there weren't many people left to even notice the disappearance of the game.
The other big difference between Blankos and regular skins from other games is, that every Blanko has a convoluted skill system. There was a bunch of random active and passive skills attached to each Blanko. Players could somewhat choose the theme of the skills and could select from a couple of them. The skills had to be levelled up with XP Coins or via the Battle Pass and the XP Coins could obviously also be bought in the shop. Every Blanko had also 3 different Grades, which consisted of 15 levels each. Honestly, this was a really elaborated and in my opinion bad system. It allowed players with highly levelled Blankos to have an advantage over other players in the minigames. You could for example unlock a jetpack, which allowed you to fly. There was also obviously a paying incentive, to sell or purchase Blankos with the best skills on the marketplace. I don't think this whole Skills attached to skins system was a good idea.
Before we end this review, there was a pretty interesting article about Blankos Block Party on engadget.com, where the developers openly admitted, that they didn't originally plan to make Blankos a videogame. It was supposed to be a prototype of their NFT marketplace for investors, but they liked the idea of using players as a proving ground. Engadget therefore compared the game to a Trojan horse into the videogame space.
I would just like to point out, that Blockchain technology can be a great solution for financial transactions, but it isn't necessarily a good solution for videogames. There would be ways to use blockchain technology to benefit players instead of publishers, but they are obviously not interested in using those. NFTs on the other hand simply don't work in videogames. They are not accepted by most players and at the moment are very likely to ruin the game they are attached to. This topic would certainly deserve to be addressed in a separate article, but I will leave at that for today.
Result:
Blankos Block Party was a weird game. It wasn't an epic failure (pun intended), at least gameplaywise, but it was also very far away from being a hidden gem. The whole NFT implementation and the attachment of skills to skins was a mess. The gameplay experience was serviceable, but there was no reason why players should have chosen Blankos over Roblox, Core or Fall Guys, unless they were gambling on selling NFTs. I understand the negative emotional sentiment towards this game, but I would rate the entire experience as pretty average. There are a lot of worse games out there, but also a lot of better ones.
5/10
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