Blue Stinger: A Confusing, Hilarious, and Not Scary Survival Horror Game

I don’t know much about the horror games on the Sega Dreamcast. While I owned the system when it came out, I quickly pivoted to the PS2 and largely forgot about my Dreamcast. Now that I’m revisiting it, I’m finding many games I missed out on.

Blue Stinger is an odd game. It is almost like a horror comedy, which I’m not sure was intentional or not. It has some awkward moments like the first Resident Evil, and it is strangely well-lit when I compare it to other horror games.

Let’s see what else this game has to offer. I know a little about it, and I’m going in with an open mind. I want to see if this is an overlooked game or a forgettable mess. I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that it is great.

TLDR: Blue Stinger is Unintentionally Funny and has Decent Gameplay.

This is an Odd and Confusing Story

Let me see if I got this right. A dinosaur island was discovered in the 1990s. An organization was set up to monitor and research the island. You play as a guy on a rescue team.

Some weird alien stuff takes place, and all hell breaks loose on the island. A protective dome around the island prevents help from coming, or the agency responsible for helping the island doesn’t feel like helping. It could go either way.

The dialogue and conversations are nonsensical at times. It feels like I’m playing an Italian horror movie, something like Troll or one of the Thunder Warrior movies, where the actors are just saying words, and if they make sense, it is a happy accident. Blue Stinger is like a B movie in terms of dialogue.

I’m not entirely sure what the characters’ relationship is. Everyone talks like they have a closed head injury. This has to be intentional because no one would look at this and say it is good.

I had to check a synopsis of the plot to figure out what was happening and why. From what I read in the Wikipedia article, everything has to do with aliens. There are two species that don’t like each other for some reason. I guess that works.

The story is fine, but the voice acting and dialogue the poor actors were forced to read are terrible. I would like to see this idea put into a better game. It feels like Troll 2 or some other Italian horror movie that was mysteriously turned into a game. Blue Stinger is unintentionally funny.

Gameplay is Pretty Good

Blue Stinger’s gameplay is much better than the story. I first thought this was a survival horror game like Resident Evil. It isn’t that, and it plays more like an action-adventure game. It is also a shorter game.

The gameplay is okay. Blue Stinger has good controls that sometimes get hamstrung by the camera. You can punch or shoot your enemies, so you don’t have to rely on ammo.

Instead of relying on finding items, you can purchase healing items and ammo from vending machines. Sometimes, those vending machines are empty, and you can still find items on the ground. Having the vending machines is cool, though.

Beyond the healing items and ammo, you can buy weapons from vending machines. You can find anything in these machines! I’m a little surprised that we don’t have a gun vending machine in the US.

It makes me wonder what was going on in this research facility. Why did they think having these machines here was a good idea? How would the mutants have taken over the island if everyone had access to guns and ammo? There are so many questions that won’t be answered.

Enemies will respawn whenever you return to an area. This sucks. I don’t like it when a survival horror game does this. Granted, Blue Stinger does play like more of an action-adventure game instead of a survival horror.

The big difference is how big your inventory is in Blue Stinger. It takes a lot of the stress out of this type of game by eliminating inventory management. I also find it funny that the game thinks a vending machine sandwich will increase your health. The sodas make sense, I suppose.

The game goes overboard on a few things. There are too many countdowns in the game, and there are an absurd number of key cards for a game like this. It is like a greatest-hits list of all the things that annoy some people about games like this.

Within the first hour, you get hit with two countdowns. The first is a two-minute countdown, and the second is 42 minutes. It seems like games took the countdown from Resident Evil and thought they needed to be everywhere in a horror game.

The game is fine when you aren’t running around collecting random keys and trying to remember what door to go in. This isn’t a great game, but it is unintentionally funny. A bad camera hamstrings the gameplay, and you also have a lot of backtracking to find random keys.

I spent most of my time trying to remember where I needed to go and fighting with the camera. There are enemies in the game who respawn whenever you leave a room. It gets very frustrating, but you can easily avoid most enemies.

The Camera is Your Biggest Enemy

Blue Stinger looks good for a game released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Dreamcast games have aged very well compared to the PS1 and N64 games. The graphics and cutscenes look good.

The game uses in-game graphics for its cutscenes. Things look great. It isn’t going to blow anyone away, but the graphics have aged very well when compared to other games.

The camera is your biggest enemy in the game. Like many games from this time, the camera is pretty terrible. If I could control it, then it wouldn’t be so bad. It makes some parts of the game harder than they need to be.

Since most of the game takes place in hallways, a fixed camera could’ve solved all of my issues with the visuals. As it stands now, this is the worst part of the game. I spent most of my time fighting against the camera while trying to fight, remember where I needed to go, and make it from one location to another.

The graphics are hit-or-miss. The game looks outstanding, even though it is mostly hallways. It is nice to look at. The camera is awful and probably should have been a fixed view like the Resident Evil games or similar to Mario 64 and Silent Hill.

7/10. Blue Stinger has many problems. The gameplay isn’t one of them, but the camera, voice acting, and story all have issues. Some of the dialogue is so bad that it becomes funny.

Pros

• Good Graphics
• Good Controls
• Unintentionally Funny

Cons

• Awful Camera
• Bizarre Dialogue
• Way too many Keys and Other Collectables

Conclusion

A good comparison to this game is Dino Crisis. Blue Stinger is the funny version of that game. It’s like comparing the Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the sequel. The two have some similarities, but one is supposed to be a dark comedy instead of a traditional horror game.

This might not have been the developer’s intention, but it is what I thought of when I was playing it. Sometimes, it felt like the developers saw something that worked in Resident Evil and decided to overdo it in this game. You see this in many late 1990s and early 2000s horror games.

I like this game. I’m not sure if the developers intended for me to laugh so hard at it, but that is what I was doing. The dialogue could not have been written that way on purpose. It is hilariously bad.

If you liked this post, check out my Indie Horror Games list or my Deception series overview.