he 2D shooter has been dying a slow death for the last decade and a half, so it’s heartening to see the a genre renaissance happening in the world of indie games and services like Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. Majesco’s Blast Works is the direct descendent of Tumiki Fighters, a freeware title created by Japanese shooter savant Kenta Cho. With Budcat Creations, Majesco has crafted Cho’s basic template into one of the more unique console shooters I’ve played in years.

Essentially, it’s Katamari Damacy meets Defender. Players take control of one of a number of spaceships and proceed to blast various enemies to bits. Your ship then latches onto downed foes, eventually forming a giant mass of space debris around your craft. While you can use the space junk as an ad-hoc shield, the downed crafts also give you new types of projectile fire. At first I found Blast Works too chaotic, but soon grew to love the strategy that comes from deciding when to use my bulk as a shield and when to quickly suck it into my ship with the shoulder button to preserve my debris collection. It’s certainly challenging – a near ridiculous amount of enemies are onscreen, each with its own complex patterns of fire.

It’s certainly not perfect; the difficulty balancing is rough around the edges, and the co-op multiplayer is ruined by the fact that the camera doesn’t pull back, resulting in total chaos as each player’s hunk of junk grows in size. However, I’m pretty addicted to Blast Works, and this addiction might never end due to the amazing level editor and online community functions, which gives players the ability to create anything and everything in the game and share them for free online. All in all, it’s an excellent entry in a criminally overlooked genre.