The game follows Elliot on his adventures through Dinosaur Island. He's chilling on his boat with a friend while he builds an anime girl-in-a-bottle (no, don't think about it) when a meteor crashes down and causes a monster outbreak. Elliot is soon accompanied by a guy called Dogs are are assisted by a chick called Janine and the three of them must work together to stop the outbreak by shooting a lot of things in the face. Oh, also the anime girl-in-a-bottle turns into some weird ghost thing, don't think about it too hard.
On the surface, Blue Stinger might seem like any other survival horror game and I spent my first couple of hours with the game playing it as such but I quickly found out that you will be absolutely miserable if you're trying to go through things that way. There's no real survival or horror elements to Blue Stinger, its a much faster affair where enemies drop cash and guns/ammo can be bought from vending machines so no need to conserve, just blow everything to high hell. The horror on the other hand falls completely flat but I'm not entirely convinced that's what they were going for. The imagry is trying to be horrific with ihabitants of Dinosaur Island having their bodies taken over and mutated but the whole thing has the vibe of a low budget action B movie with a horror theme. For example there's one point where you have to fight a jeep that's been turned into a giant crab monster and when you kill it you are rewarded with a minigun for Dogs that allows you to just absolutely mow shit down.
Once you realize to not play it like you would play something like Resident Evil though the fun factor jumps up a fair bit. There's also a number of setpieces throughout the game that are, admitedly, quite stupid but will have you grinning like an absolute idiot as Eliot and Dogs bumble their way through them. An example of a good one is that there's one point where Eliot has to cross a chasm to get to another part of the island but instead of going around or finding away across, he climbs up a big tower with a gas tank on the top of it and blows it up as he jumps off to have the blast just throw him across. It's dumb to the point of it being awesome and I wouldn't have it any other way.
There are some frustrating parts of the game though. The two most notable of these are a section near the start where you must navigate a freezer but the freezer is a big ass maze that's slowly killing you AND there's enemies inside it AND if you fuck up the puzzle it becomes a giant heater that STILL kills you as you go through it and the solution to the puzzle or even what elements need to be interacted with aren't particularly clear. There's also a bit where Elliot gets a bit sick and its not hard but they decided that a lot of wall climbing needed to be done in that part and the climbing is slow as all fuck and it reverses your controls when you're doing it which makes navigating the area take a bout 8 times longer than it usually would.
Overall though, good fuckin' game. The only other game that I think the company did after this is Illbleed and if you've played that as well as Blue Stinger you might come to the conclusion that the development team consists entirely of insane people. It's sort of hard to recommend to people but if you don't mind some late 90s jank and you need a good chuckle from a retro game then Blue Stinger has you covered
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