Match-based shooters might be a dime a dozen these days, but the latest iteration on Xbox has quite the twist: most of the firefights take place in complete darkness. Announced and launched into early access at this week’s Xbox Partner Preview, Blindfire is a first-person multiplayer shooter that pits players against each other in pitch-black warehouse shootouts where there’s an emphasis on slower-paced, more tactical gameplay than you’ll see in other shooters.
“We very quickly realized that the dark setting meant that a lot of the typical design rules for a shooter no longer applied. It sounds like hyperbole, but turning out the lights changes everything,” said Matt Dunthorne, lead designer for Blindfire at developer Double Eleven, in an interview about the project on Xbox Wire. “It’s a pitch-black room, you have a gun, so do your enemies … good luck!”
I’m a huge multiplayer first-person shooter guy with plenty of experience, so I was initially intrigued by Blindfire‘s concept. Anything that tries to break the Counter-Strike or Call of Duty shooter formula is a win in its own right, but I was interested to see if Blindfire could scratch that itch for an alternative shooter I’ve felt while waiting for news on Splitgate 2. Into the darkness I went, and what I found was an interesting concept that may already be nearing its ceiling in early access.
A shot in the dark
Blindfire is certainly unique and enjoyable at its core. The default Bodycount mode is a multiround deathmatch that can be played solo or as a team. Players are dropped into a tight warehouse battlefield with little-to-zero light to help them find and kill their enemies. You aren’t entirely in the dark — you get a dim outline of the map’s major obstacles — but without help, you’d be hard-pressed to see an enemy standing a few feet in front of you. To spot your enemies, you’ll rely on just a few tools.
Each player has an ability called Echo at their disposal which briefly reveals the outlines of their immediate surroundings, giving them a brief look and, hopefully, a peek at the last-known positions of enemies. Players need to use this mechanic tactfully to win. Spamming it every time it becomes available (there’s a brief reboot period after every use) isn’t going to work well in the long run. You’ve got to carefully plan your Echo use, popping the ability when you hear the movement of an enemy in the dark or you see someone running away in the shadows.
Without the Echo, you’ll be relying mostly on bright muzzle flashes set off whenever a player fires a weapon. In every shooter, firing your weapon gives away your position to other players, but in Blindfire, it puts a target on your back. Even if you can get a clean kill, your muzzle flash will have every other player in the arena homed in on your position. There is a sprint option, but there’s a slight delay between shooting and hoofing it that makes escaping any sort of sustained shootout difficult.
Playing through round after round of Bodycount, I certainly picked up a few tips to survive longer — only take fights you’ll know you’ll win, try to be a third-party in other firefights, find that balance between hunting (and making noise) and staying still and waiting for your prey. I’d like to say I got into a groove and found some consistency, but my results felt a little random. Some matches I would manage to sneak around and pick off a few other players, and in others I would accidentally back into an opponent and have my game cut short with a quick headshot. I’m sure that with extensive play, I could come out on top more often than not, especially if I coordinate with a whole team, but the lack of light really does add a luck element to the game.
I swear I’m not just being a sore loser — I promise.
It’s fairly easy to take someone out, too. While it feels fun when you can pull off a slick multi-kill, it’s a little discouraging when someone waiting in the dark picks you off. Luckily, you get point for kills, and not for being the last man standing. I legitimately don’t know if I could be considered good at the game when all that stands between first and last place is someone blind firing (aye!) into the dark and happening to hit me in the face.
Some of the more interesting mechanics in Blindfire are only accessible after death. If you get taken out early, you enter a post-death drone mode where you can still affect the outcome of the match. Flying around the map, you’re able to set off a collection of lights, traps and alerts that are scattered across the battlefield. You can interact with several mannequins that fire blank rounds and draw other players to a certain area. You can set off car alarms to draw attention toward (or away from) other interest points. You can also just straight-up turn on overhead spotlights positioned over the guy that just killed you.
I was mainly just hunting down and messing with whoever killed me in a particular round. What can I say? I’m vengeful.
This is a fun way to play, but you can also be a bit more tactful. In team fights, drone players are almost more important than the soldiers left on the field — even if you weren’t using party chat, you can direct your teammates toward vulnerable enemies. And it wasn’t until I lost a match by a single kill that I considered actively sabotaging players that were near the top of the leaderboard. Sure, the guy in last place was the one who put a bullet in me, but I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
What’s the ceiling?
While the concept of the game is quite simple, turning off the lights certainly does change things, and Double Eleven has added just enough extras to keep a fight in the dark interesting.
Blindfire is in early access right now and launched just days ago, so this is a very early take, but I don’t know if I see myself diving into this game with any sort of consistency. That’s fine; not every single title needs to capture your attention span for hours at a time. But I can’t help but feel like Blindfire is a little shallow compared to other shooters in the arena.
A few complete matches of Bodycount in a row, with some easy wins and some massive losses, and I felt like I had experienced what it had to offer. The Bodycount game mode didn’t feel like the main gameplay — it felt more like the quirky extra mode that’s attached to the full game, like Call of Duty’s Gun Game or Oddball and Infection in Halo Infinite. With so much of my success in the game feeling like it was dependent on the player base, players who died trying to sabotage me, or just pure spray-and-pray luck, I wanted somewhere else to play where I could prove that I was actually good at it.
This might be me coping with not immediately being great at a game, but I’m confident I have a point. This feels like a fun, quick shooter to jump into with your buddies, but not something I would really want to put effort into becoming skilled at, at least not at this point. Of course, the Blindfire team is already fielding questions about what players can look forward to from here. Will there be new guns added down the road? New maps? Voice chat? What will the other game modes look like (assuming there are some)?
Blindfire is certainly a unique concept and a fun shooter in bursts, but whether it has legs at launch will depend on whether or not the base gameplay can expand significantly on what’s available in early access. Until we hear more from the developers and this project evolves, we’ll be waiting in the dark.
Blindfire is available now in early access on Xbox Series X/S and PC.
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