Me wanting to be a cat...
We take the same and start again ? Not exactly. If the cat Blinx is always present, in this second part he only acts as an extra since you will control one of his many furry colleagues. As is the case in more and more productions (Top Spin, Def Jam : Fight For New York...), so you will start by creating your character, in this case, here to start, a cat. Type and color of fur, length of ears and tail (no comment), eye color, size and build, clothing line, if the options are numerous, they are not particularly useful for a platform game. But let's get out of the groomer to get to the heart of the action.
The Time Station, headquarters of the chrono-spireurs, is attacked by an army of fake Tom-Tom pigs in the color 'Chernobyl green'. Add to that the destruction of the ancient Great Crystal, and voila the universe is headed straight for destruction. On the other side, the real Tom-Toms follow this attack on the television news, and to satisfy the female effigy of a dream of the king, also go in search of the fragments of this crystal. You will have understood (NDRC: no, in fact, I did not understand anything!), the scenario does not shine by its intelligence, and is only a pretext to justify the parallel story between the chrono-spireur cats and the pig bandits. We will then quickly forget the original motivations, despite some successful cutscenes, to be content to advance from one end of the levels to the other.
You will therefore alternately control the nice kitties controlling time, in an action-based gameplay, and the demonic pigs controlling space, in phases of pseudo infiltration. On the feline side, we therefore find a revised and corrected version of Blinx first of the name, and with the throwing of vacuumed garbage cans and other waste, we will recover different crystals to win our first chrono-commands. Fortunately, the developers of Artoon have listened to the criticisms given to the first installment of the game, and you will no longer have to collect the crystals in a specific order to finally be able to act on time. You will then gradually have access to pause to stop time around you, to slow motion (to be able, for example, to aim at an enemy that is too fast), to rewind to go back in time (to avoid the destruction of certain elements of the decor, or again to return a boss to its native form), to the fast forward which is equivalent to a turbo, and finally to the recording to split. Among the novelties of this Blinx 2, we will especially appreciate the Matrixian phases, where you can slow down the projectiles coming towards you to avoid them while following the directions indicated on the screen, or even stop time to circumvent and destroy this mass of projectiles. The money accumulated as you level up will also allow you to buy or upgrade equipment, and you can then, with a suitable vacuum cleaner, combine several chrono-commands together, such as pause and fast forward, or one more recording and slow motion. Unfortunately, the game remains as scripted as the first one, and you will only use these actions on time at specific times and places in the game. To simplify things even more, an interlocutor will not hesitate to tell you what to do 5 minutes, and staying stuck in a level raises the IQ of a cooked whelk.
All is good in the pig
After the control of time, it's time for space to be mastered, and the pigs' turn to act. If the Tom-Toms are sticking to the broom and don't yet have the equipment of the chrono-spireurs, they sometimes think between two food orgies and have finally been able to build enough gadgets to balance the scales. Exit then the throwing of rubbish, place in the discretion and the heavy weapons for the moments when it misses. Character change, gameplay change, Blinx 2 gives the floor to the sworn enemies of cats (no no, it's neither dogs nor mice), and gives a few winks to Metal Gear Solid in passing. With decoys, distortion tunnels to teleport or even an invisibility cloak (Harry Potter style) we seek stealth to overtake the masters of time and reach the pieces of crystals before them. We then use the decorative objects to camouflage ourselves, we crawl, lean against the wall, turn off the lights or bypass the laser traps to reach the objective which very often boils down to a treasure or an accessory to bring back. Condemned to carry a bag on the return trip, your movements are only more reduced, and you will often have to give up 
temporarily your socket to clear the passage. In your arsenal, black holes, space bubbles, dimensional portals, a simple banana peel but also heavier weapons. From the laser pistol to the bazooka, via the sniper, the phases with our war pigs will quickly turn into a butcher, and stealth takes a back seat, especially once we have found the tank, which we will customize. later in the HQ store.
In any case, cats or pigs, the game is handled well despite some camera problems (fortunately fewer than before), and various tutorials before each chapter help you understand the new controls. On the technical side, it's a little less brilliant on the other hand with graphics that haven't changed much since the first part, but above all an annoying soundtrack (especially our psychopath Maxime). Despite these few flaws, we can only underline the progress of Artoon who tried to correct the situation of a series that had started badly. So more playable, but also more varied, Blinx 2 is finally a good surprise, especially on a console where platform games are not commonplace. Add to that a small price of 35€, and we can only verify the fact that cats always end up falling back on their feet………with time.
