Voxel Blast is a game where you control a spaceship traveling across complex 3D environments to fight enemies in cages set to trap them with you. Navigate as fast as you can through the level to reach the beacons or risk facing squads of enemies already waiting for you; then use your weapons and evasive maneuvers to take them down in bright colorful explosions.
An electric neon, colorful yet sparse look is the inspiration for all the elements in the game; the setting, the player ships, enemies, visual effects and music take notes from simple vector art and electronic music.
Voxel Blast was created as a love letter to 3D dogfighting games and also space shooters, in an attempt to find a common ground between those two kinds of games. In Voxel Blast you can choose one of three ships with different weapons, yet all of them very focused in providing a satisfying dog-fighting style and movement.
The game has three modes to learn and test the skills necessary for the player to succeed: the Challenge mode, the Survival mode and the Arcade. The Challenge mode consist in a series of courses marked trough navigation beacons with limited time to reach them; this mode teaches the player the necessary skills to fly and navigate the spaceships in a safer environment that the arcade with lower stakes overall, but with a focus on high speed precise flying. The Survival mode presents the player with an arena much like the ones in the Arcade mode, but in a three-lives endless score-attack combat with a constant flow of a varied mix of enemies; in the survival mode the player can see all the enemies he might find in the Arcade and develop ways to fight them, including the interactions between different compositions of enemies. The Arcade mode combines the combat and navigation in stages comprised of sets of flying sections and fighting gauntlets, where the number of destroyed enemies and the time taken to complete count towards the final score.
The game features gamepad support for analog direct input and some flightsticks, but it has been designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard using a system that tries to reproduce the nuance of using a stick to control the roll and pitch of the spaceship. This makes the control of the ship one of the main skills to master in the game, along with the speed control, positional engagement of enemies and management of special projectiles.
