RE-REVIEW: Nitroplus Blasterz: Heroines Infinite Duel


Title	Nitroplus Blasterz: Heroines Infinite Duel
Developer	EXAMU
Publisher	Marvelous USA/XSEED Games
Release Date	December 8, 2016
Genre	Fighting
Platform	PS4, PS3, Arcade, Steam
Age Rating	N/A
Official Website

As someone who spends a lot of time gaming on PC, I’m pleased to see that more and more fighters are making their way to Steam. While I can’t definitively say whether the player base for these games is as large as it is on PlayStation consoles, it’s nice to know that we have the option to game this way. Nitroplus Blasterz is the latest fighter to transfer over to the almighty PC, with all the DLC included in the package. In a growing and increasingly competitive platform for the genre, how does it stand up to similar games?

Nitroplus Blasterz features a 14 character roster, a decent size for a niche game of this sort, and this includes the DLC characters like Heart from Arcana Heart and Homura from Senran Kagura. Coincidentally, EXAMU is the developer of the Arcana Heart series, so it was only natural that Heart’s inclusion would happen in some form. While I can’t say that I’m really familiar with most of the girls in this game, I was happy to see Saber from Fate/Stay Night in here too.

Despite the lack of a tutorial, Nitroplus Blasterz isn’t all too difficult to play. Many special moves can be done with simple quarter circle motions, and the fact that you can summon two assist characters to turn the tables for you every so often makes this a fair choice for beginners to pick up. It has mechanics standard to a lot of anime fighters, like air dashes, ground and air recoveries, and breakouts (known in this game as Blasts, which have the added benefits of charging your special gauge, recovering your health and extending combos). The arcade mode isn’t too difficult on its default setting of “4”, but the last boss might give you a little trouble. Still, she’s not nearly as bad as any given SNK fighting game boss.

The PC port of Nitroplus Blasterz can display at resolutions up to 1080p in Windowed or Fullscreen, with a V-Sync option. There aren’t any advanced graphical features here, but you can slightly adjust parts of the HUD to your liking if you want. The art style is pleasant to look at, the girls all look good here in both their illustrated art and sprite forms, although the quality isn’t quite as good as spritework you’d find in games like BlazBlue or Guilty Gear Xrd. But the cut-in animations for special moves and the combos themselves are really flashy eye candy. The multilayered backgrounds on the stages are nice to look at but I wish there was more going on with them, like people in the crowd watching or something to that effect.

Nitroplus Blasterz has native Xbox controller support, so you don’t have to worry about trying to figure out which buttons correspond to your keys or anything like that. It also features online support through network play, which doesn’t seem to be too active at this time but I hope that it picks up soon. You can do ranked matches with online leaderboards, or search for and create your own room for casual play (up to a maximum of 6 slots), allowing you to filter by connection strength but not by region.

All that said, I think Nitroplus Blasterz is a pretty good buy at its price of 29.99. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but I think it does a great job at easing people into fighters who might find advanced games like Arc System Works’ fighters too intimidating.