Blast Out

Blast Out is a fast-paced, arcade-style arena combat game where players master a unique ability system to create powerful combos and knock their opponents into environmental hazards. Set in deadly, ever-changing arenas filled with traps like seas of lava, the game emphasizes reflexes, strategic use of knockback mechanics, and over-the-top core gameplay. Players can customize their characters with over 200 combinations, earn loot through gameplay, and utilize the environment to gain a hilarious and decisive victory over their foes.

Blast Out: The Forgotten Arena Brawler That Fizzled Out

In the vast, ever-expanding universe of video games, there are titles that define generations, those that become cult classics, and those that vanish almost as quickly as they appear, leaving behind only a whisper of what could have been. Blast Out, a vibrant, top-down arena brawler from the small Swedish developer Tarhead Studio, falls squarely into the latter category. It is a game built on a foundation of genuinely innovative ideas, born from a successful Kickstarter campaign and inspired by a beloved mod, yet it ultimately serves as a poignant case study in the harsh realities of the Early Access marketplace and the immense challenges facing small indie studios. This is the story of a blast that was heard by far too few.

Development History & Context

The Mod That Inspired a Dream

Blast Out did not emerge from a vacuum. Its spiritual DNA can be traced directly back to Warlock, a popular player-vs-player custom map for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Warlock distilled the RTS giant down to its purest competitive essence: powerful wizards battling on a single arena, using spells with dramatic knockback to fling opponents into deadly environmental hazards. This concept captured the imagination of the team at Tarhead Studio.

In an era where the games-as-a-service model was becoming dominant and the indie scene was booming, Tarhead saw an opportunity to expand this beloved mod into a full-fledged, standalone experience. Under its original working title, RUiN, the project was launched on Kickstarter, where it found its audience. A modest but passionate community of 563 backers pledged just over £10,000 to bring the vision to life. This budget, as noted by contemporary reviewers, was minuscule compared to the titles it drew comparisons to—Super Smash Bros., SMITE—yet it was a testament to the faith players had in the core concept.

The Early Access Gambit

Developed and published solely by Tarhead Studio AB, Blast Out entered Steam Early Access on September 21, 2017. This move was a strategic one, common for small studios seeking to fund continued development through player sales while building a community. The plan, as outlined in previews, was to spend approximately six months in Early Access, working “together with the community” to expand the game, with the studio even being open to a free-to-play transition if player demand called for it. The game was a product of its time, leveraging the Early Access model not as a perpetual beta but as a hoped-for pathway to a polished final release.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

A Thematic Vacuum

It must be stated unequivocally: Blast Out is not a narrative-driven game. There is no intricate plot, no deep lore to uncover, and no character arcs to follow. The “story” is the universal language of arena combat. Players select one of three anthropomorphic characters—a bestial brawler, a cunning rogue, a sturdy tank—but these are archetypes, not characters. They are vessels for gameplay, defined not by their backstories but by their passive traits and statistical profiles.

The overarching theme is one of chaotic, kinetic fun. The game embraces its identity as a pure arcade experience. The narrative is the one you create through gameplay: the tension of a close match, the hilarity of perfectly timing a knockback into a newly erupted lava flow, and the triumph of discovering a devastating ability combo. Thematically, it leans into the same space as Super Smash Bros. or Brawlhalla, where the joy of physics-based combat and outplaying an opponent is the entire point. The dialogue is the sound of spells firing and characters grunting as they’re launched across the screen. In this sense, its lack of narrative is not a failure but a deliberate design choice to keep the focus squarely on the competitive action.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Core Loop: Knockback is King

At its heart, Blast Out is a 2v2 competitive arena brawler played from a diagonal-down isometric perspective. The objective is simple: eliminate the opposing team across three rounds to claim victory. However, the path to achieving this is where the game’s ingenuity shines.

The absolute cornerstone of its design is the knockback mechanic. This is not merely a visual flourish; it is the central tool of strategy and elimination. Direct damage from abilities is often less lethal than the environmental hazards that litter the arenas. Matches become a tactical game of positioning and physics, reminiscent of Smash Bros.‘ goal to ring-out opponents. Players must master a suite of abilities—pushes, pulls, stuns, mines—not just to damage foes, but to maneuver them into deadly traps like spinning blades, encroaching electrical storms, or sudden pits of lava that activate as the match progresses.

Profound Customization and “Combo Crafting”

Where Blast Out truly aimed to innovate was in its deep, almost modular customization system. This was far more than simple character selection.

1. Character Choice: Players start by choosing one of three base characters, each with a unique passive trait (e.g., damage increasing with consecutive hits, healing when a shield is charged).
2. Gear Selection: Armor pieces can be equipped, each providing stat bonuses and penalties, adding a layer of RPG-like min-maxing to balance a character’s strengths and weaknesses.
3. Weapon Choice: The selected weapon dictates the character’s basic, auto-attack.
4. Ability Loadouts: This is the masterstroke. Players select four special abilities from a shared pool, creating a unique loadout that can be applied to any character. This system decouples abilities from specific heroes, allowing for incredible flexibility. Furthermore, abilities could be leveled up to unlock “variants”—a mine that knocks back could be swapped for a bear trap variant that roots an enemy in place instead.

This system promised over 200 possible combinations, allowing players to discover powerful synergies and create builds that suited their personal playstyle, whether that was a long-range controller, a close-up brawler, or a supportive partner. Tinkering with these systems was reportedly an engaging and rewarding meta-game in itself.

The Flaws in the Foundation

For all its mechanical ambition, Blast Out‘s Early Access build was hamstrung by significant practical issues:

• Content Light: At launch, it featured only one game mode across a mere three maps, leading to rapid repetition.
• Opaque Onboarding: The game relied on simplistic text tutorials that were described as being in “slightly broken English.” They failed to prepare new players for the frenetic, strategic reality of a live match. The absence of a robust tutorial or offline bot matches meant players had to learn by losing in real PvP, a frustrating experience that risked alienating newcomers.
• Matchmaking Malaise: With a small player base, finding a match could be a “lengthy process,” a death knell for any multiplayer-focused title.

World-Building, Art & Sound

A Vibrant, Deadly Playground

Blast Out’s world-building is environmental. The arenas are not just backdrops; they are active, lethal participants in the combat. Previews describe them as vibrant and visually distinct, filled with color and clear visual cues for their various traps and transforming hazards. The art style was functional and appealing, using an isometric perspective that recalled MOBAs like SMITE but with a brighter, more arcade-like palette.

The sound design, though not extensively documented, would have been crucial. The cacophony of spells firing, the impactful thwack of a character being hit, and the dramatic rumble of a new arena hazard activating would have been essential sells for the game’s chaotic feedback loop. The world is built not through lore tablets but through the immediate, tactile understanding of a deadly environment. It sells a fantasy of being a powerful warrior in a gladiatorial spectacle, where the arena itself is your greatest weapon and most formidable foe.

Reception & Legacy

A Whisper, Not a Roar

The reception to Blast Out is defined most powerfully by its absence. Despite its promising core, the game vanished from the industry’s consciousness.

• Critical Reception: There is a profound lack of critical reviews. Major aggregator sites like Metacritic and MobyGames list no critic scores or reviews. The most significant piece of coverage is a single, thoughtful Steam Early Access preview from Pass the Controller, which praised its “solid foundations,” “fast-paced and tactical combat,” and “vibrant aesthetic” while rightly critiquing its lack of content and poor onboarding. This preview concluded with a rare recommendation to buy into the Early Access immediately, a sign of the strong potential seen at the time.
• Commercial Reception: The game failed to capture a sustainable audience. The lengthy matchmaking times mentioned in its only preview are the clearest indicator of this commercial struggle.

A Legacy of Unfulfilled Potential

The legacy of Blast Out is tragic but instructive. By early 2018, the game’s development had effectively ceased. Filip Andersson, a junior designer who worked on the game, confirmed the unfortunate conclusion: “Unfortunately there was no budget to hire me [which] led me to seek new avenues shortly before the game was discontinued.”

Blast Out stands as a cautionary tale in the Steam Early Access ecosystem. It exemplifies how even a game with a compelling, well-designed core mechanic and genuine innovation can fail without a critical mass of players, content, and the financial runway to see development through. Its ideas—the deep, classless ability system, the environmental-hazard-focused combat—were ahead of their time and remain impressive on paper. It is a fascinating footnote, a blast of creativity that faded too quickly, leaving its potential forever unfulfilled. It influenced no major titles because too few played it, but it serves as a reminder of the hundreds of ambitious indie projects that quietly live and die on digital storefronts.

Conclusion

Blast Out is a ghost in the machine of video game history. To review it is to review a promise rather than a finished product. Its core gameplay loop of knockback-based arena combat is undeniably clever, and its profound customization system offered a level of player agency that was truly remarkable for a small, crowdfunded project. For the few who experienced it during its brief life, it provided “intimate and intense” matches that showcased a developer with a strong understanding of competitive mechanics.

However, its severe lack of initial content, poor tutorialization, and inability to build a player base led to its rapid demise. It is not a game that can be recommended to play today, as its servers are likely barren and its development abandoned. Instead, Blast Out earns its place in history as a poignant artifact of the indie development cycle—a brief, bright spark of creativity that ultimately serves as a sobering lesson on the importance of content, community, and capital in the unforgiving world of game development. It is a blast from the past that never truly got to echo into the future.