Hi PlayStation.Blog Readers, this is Viktor Kalvachev, author of Blue Estate comic books also working at HESAW. Today, I wanted to introduce you to our little baby: Blue Estate on PS4, a brand new rail shooter taking advantage of DualShock 4’s gyroscopic features. We’ve tried to sum up everything in five points to give you an overview of the game. Get ready for a helluva ride!

1: Blue Estate – the comics behind the game

Blue Estate is a critically-acclaimed and award-nominated graphic novel, and has been created by Viktor Kalvachev and Kosta Yanev.

Blue Estate was published by Image Comics a couple of years ago with the Graphic Novel coming out this September. In a Tarantino-esque noir style narrative, a clueless private eye stumbles into tense relations between several LA crime organizations.

Blue Estate is a high-octane adrenaline mix of violent comedy, tangled alliances, mistaken identities, desperate heroes, ruthless villains, bad decisions, and maximum firepower. The inspiration for the whole universe comes from the movies of Guy Ritchie, Tarantino, and Elmore Leonard. The game is a prequel of Blue Estate Season 1.

2: DualShock 4 makes it easy

This is probably the best part of the game — the controls. With the PS4 version we really wanted to bring the original arcade light gun feeling back without players having to buy extra accessories, so we decided to use the new gyroscope feature and the result was amazing. It takes only seconds to get used to and hours to master. You basically point the controller and squeeze the trigger; you don’t ever have to use the joysticks. For all the gestures we’re using the touch pad, which gives the opportunity for unique gameplay experiences, depending on how players choose to hold and interact with the controller. It works and it’s addictive.

Why a rail shooter? The team felt nostalgic to the genre of light gun shooters and the gameplay inspirations came from old titles like Time Crisis, Virtua Cop, and House of the Dead. With the next-gen technologies of PlayStation, we saw the opportunity to bring back this fun to the players.

3: A crazy story served with crazy characters

Blue Estate is a darkly funny on-rails shooter with a crazy story about surreal characters, told by a clueless private detective, who’s being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Procrastination. It’s funny, ridiculous and unpredictable, bringing back the joy of arcade light gun shooters. It’s not to be taken seriously, but consumed as a shot of entertainment with a killing spree twist.

Two characters are playable in Blue Estate: Tony and Clarence. Tony is the only son of Don Luciano, the Boss of the West Coast Mafia. He grew up in the shadow of his powerful father, who is constantly disappointed in him. Tony hates the world and the world hates him back. He starts being a proud owner of a strip club who is looking at the bright future of maybe becoming “the Don” one day, when his arrogance turns everything around, dragging him down to rock bottom.

It all begins when a rival gang (The Sik Bros) kidnaps Tony’s best dancer Cherry, the only person he has a soft spot for. Tony goes to their club to get her back and thanks to his “sophisticated diplomacy skills” things get out of hand before he can finish his first sentence. He manages to start a war he can’t win and this is where the second playable character comes in — Clarence, the complete opposite of Tony. Clarence is an ex-navy seal trying to come up with 75 grand to save his mom’s house from foreclosure. He steps in this world of mobsters as a poor man, hired to clean Tony’s mess and thanks to his skills and patience soon becomes the best hit-man of the Italian mob, whether he wants it or not.

4: Some not-so-kind enemies

On the graphic side, we knew from the beginning that we wanted a lot of different characters. This is not a military game. We wanted every single character to be unique in term of design.

We also wanted the diversity of the enemies to be transcribed into the gameplay, meaning different attack patterns. Some enemies will attack you with melee combat while others will take cover and choose the best timing to shoot you from a long distance — or even throw grenade at you.

5: Share the action

We have a local co-op multiplayer mode in the game and it’s a lot of fun. We don’t see the gun anymore, but just the two crosshairs. There are plenty of things to discover each time you play and we’ve made it very difficult to survive in multiplayer mode, so you really need a buddy you can rely on and a strategy to complete each level.

Thanks to complete scoring system, players can manage to challenge their scores with a tons of features: headshots, nutshots, multiple combos, etc.

Hope that piques your interest. For any info about the game, feel free to visit the official website and drop by our Facebook page.