Blood II: The Chosen

Moby ID: 1150
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/18 10:03 PM )
Add-on (official) Included in

Description official descriptions

By the year 2028, over a hundred years have passed since the events described in Blood. CABAL, the cult dedicated to the worship of the Dark God Tchernobog, has turned into a huge corporation that calls itself "CabalCo", controlling much of what is happening in the dark, futuristic city. The undead gunslinger Caleb awakens from his slumber and continues his relentless pursuit of revenge. The company CEO, an ambitious man named Gideon, will stop at nothing in order to attain the kind of power CABAL was wielding before. But in order to fulfill his plans, he must get rid of Caleb first.

Like its predecessor, Blood II is a first-person shooter with a horror theme. The game uses the LithTech engine. There is a vast variety of weapons as well as a greater number of different enemies than the previous game. The levels themselves are rather diverse as well: In the first chapter alone, the protagonist travels from an ornate museum to a huge science facility, alleys of an ominous city street, and a futuristic flying machine. The game features a dark techno soundtrack. The player may choose to play as Caleb's companions that appeared in the first game; however, cutscenes are displayed only if the player selects Caleb.

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Windows version)

114 People (106 developers, 8 thanks) · View all

Game Concept and Design
Lead Designer
Project Manager
Lead Engineer
Lead Level Designer
Lead Artist
Lead LithTech Engineer
Game Design
Storyline
Concept Art
3D Art Engineer
Blood II Engineering
Level Design
3D Art
2D Art
Scripted Scenes
Music Composition
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 74% (based on 31 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.3 out of 5 (based on 76 ratings with 5 reviews)

A different opinion...

The Good
In opposition to Tomer's review, I'd rate the graphics as excellent. Superb even. Gory, smooth, dark, seedy and scary. (I'm running it on a PII 400 mhz, though, with Voodoo 2 accelerator).

The sound, while repetitive at times, is of great quality. And the music is glorious.

I love the story-line. A first person shooter, where you're an undead being? What a neat relief from the space-marine/anti-terrorist syndrome which lives on and on. Also, it finally gives a logical reason why you are taking bullet after bullet and living. Not many other games supply an explanation - in Quake/Doom etc., I guess you're just a hefty boy who enjoys and deals well with pain.

Awesome level design. From the straight-forward (literally) subway car where you just walk in a line, to the beautiful museum of antiquities where you have to blow up a coolant pipe and leap through skylights to get in, the missions are varied and beautiful.

Dark humour is my bag, so stumbling across a body stuffed into a washing machine and having the lady there explain that "he must have just stuck his head in too far, or something" really cracked me up. In fact, most of the acting voice-over work is funny, and well done.

It's horror based. So few games are horror based. It's a genre that should be expounded to the skies.

The Bad
The A.I. is VERY weak. They won't pursue you if you run (which may be a plus, actually, since every player knows the trick - get 'em to pursue you, wait around a corner and blast 'em when they show up). I've shot people, and as long as they can't see me when I do it, they'll just stand there and take some more. I've lit people on fire and had them stand there and take it further.

The sound can sometimes get repititive. I noticed it most with the zealots. "Come out, we won't hurt you" becomes less believable with each iteration, especially when coupled with the phrase "You don't stand a chance" over and over and over again.

The zombies of the original have been replaced by weird "worm-zombie-alien implant" things. They still look like zombies, so that's what I pretend they are. A much cooler monster.

I liked the fact that the first game took place in the 1800s. It was unique, and I preferred that time period to this one (modern/future).

Oh, and the levels take too long to load.

The Bottom Line
For fans of first-person, a definite game worth looking at. For fans of horror, even better. But don't expect the enemy to react realistically.

Windows · by Jeff Sinasac (391) · 2001

So boring and retarded it's not even worth bashing

The Good
I've been a fan of the Blood series since I played the shareware in 2003. Countless fun hours were spent setting people on fire with the flaregun, blowing them up with dynamite, and stabbing them with the voodoo doll. The Plasma Pak and Cryptic Passage expansions continued the carnage. Sure, it was nothing revolutionary, but the Blood games were simple addictive shooters. And when the chips are down, that's all you need.

Things started going crapwards for Monolith in 1998 with the abysmal Get Medieval, followed by the mediocre Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. I was skeptical but hopeful about Blood 2. 3D adaptations of 2D games don't have the most inspiring track record ever, but this is Blood we were talking about! What is there to get wrong? Just give me a 3D rendition of Blood's simplistic action and I'd be happy. Surely they couldn't screw that up? Sadly, they have. The murky toilet waters of Suck are once again lapping at Monolith's feet, and it seems the last man didn't flush.

The story is set about 100 years after the original Blood. Once again you play as the undead cowboy Caleb who has wandered the earth alone for the last century, and who once again finds his immortal soul threatened. You see, the evil cult he battled in the original Blood still exists and is now a big pimpin' organisation with billions of dollars, hundreds of assassins, and intents upon world domination. And their leader, Gideon, wants Caleb dead at all costs.

At a conceptual level the Blood 2 is the same as its prequel. You fight both human cultists and monsters (only this time, the monsters exist through genetic engineering rather than the supernatural). The game adopts the mission-based structure of Quake 2, but this usually works out to "exterminate all opposition and find the exit". Of course, there's lots of gore and gibbitude, and insofar as weapons are concerned all the old favorites are back (the flare gun, the voodoo doll), coupled with high-tech offerings like M11 assault rifles and Uzis. All weapons have secondary fire modes with allows for some variation in your attacks.

The action, although hardly thrilling, is fast-paced and the game dispenses with the annoying puzzles that sometimes plagued Blood. The new weapons and enemies are okay and the game is certainly as gory as its predecessor (in fact: probably more so because it's not being played for laughs. Blood 2 is far more serious than Blood).

The Bad
Blood 2 has lots of problems that can all be summed up as "the developers didn't give a crap".

Blood 2 was released side by side with Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. Comparing both games, it's pretty obvious which horse Monolith was backing. Shogo has squad combat, giant robots, an advanced lighting and physics engine, and an interactive story. Blood 2 has, uh, fancy blood splatters. When a studio is developing two games simultaneously it usually puts its money and effort behind one, while treating the other game as a backup if the first one fails. In this situation, Blood 2 was the backup, and contains all the associated cheapness and corner-cutting.

I suspect this game was made either to fulfill a contract or extract a few more dollars out of a license. Blood 2 is bad, but not in a spectacular car-crash kind of way. It's bad in a boring, instantly forgettable way. Blood 2 is so punishingly generic and rote there's not much to write about it. It's depressing because Monolith is a studio capable of much better. You can tell they weren't even trying when they made this.

It's like the game was made in a perverse spirit of "let's take away all of Blood's cool stuff". Blood had endless corny one-liners and pop culture references, Blood 2 has almost no humor at all. Blood had lots of environmental interaction, Blood 2 strips it back to Doom levels. Blood let you play in levels as diverse as a mausoleum and a circus, Blood 2 restricts you to factories, laboratories, and empty apartments. Blood had a cool wild west theme, Blood 2 is a generic futuristic shooter.

The one selling point Blood 2 has feels like it was shoved into the game so there would be something, anything, to write about in the game's promo material. You get to play as multiple characters with different stats. Caleb has resurrected three of his co-lieutenants and at different times you get to play as them, although this ends up feeling pretty redundant. They have different stats, but at the end of the day Ishmael, Ophelia and Gabriella are simply clones of your default character, and there's no quantifiable difference between any of them. Not to mention this knight/cleric/wizard/barbarian thing has been done to death in thousands of RPGs and a good number of FPSs (Hexen is a good place to start). This is hardly an exciting, must-buy feature.

Unlike Blood, Blood 2 uses a true 3D engine. While this may sound like a radical step forward, the game is so simple to begin with that the extra dimension adds nothing to the game. Having fancy lighting and explosions and z-axis aiming is nice, but the level design is so simplistic it might as well still be using the Build engine. The game's 3Dness is nothing more than a gimmick. I'm reminded of carpenter friend who for years used an ordinary hand-router, only to finally pay $300 for an electric router he didn't actually need because he felt he needed to keep with the times.

The game uses the LithTech engine, which to put it bluntly is a piece of crap. Blood 2 looks much worse than Quake 2 and Unreal, and is far less stable than either of those games. Expect access violations, messed up palettes, clipping errors, and other things. I lost count of the number of times I saw an enemy waving his arms through a wall. Visually the game is acceptable, but there's far too much gray (you could call Blood 2 a spiritual prequel to F.E.A.R.) and the models are extremely blocky. As far as audio goes, the game doesn't boast a dynamic sound track a'la Shogo but rather pre-recorded sound. The voice acting is crap, with Gabriel's in particular being downright awful.

The content and design is given woefully short shrift. And about the levels...well, I hope you like mazes. Blood 2 is lousy with them. The game has so many key hunts that the developers make humorous reference to it during the levels (one of your objectives is "shoot some stuff and find the key" or something). It's true that Blood also had a lot of key hunts, but that game was interesting. It had good level design. Blood 2 is pure dullsville, and having to undergo lots of repetitive key-hunting in a boring game is the gaming equivalent of Chinese water torture.

The difficulty is just as bad as Shogo's on-foot levels. On the easiest level your enemies are mentally retarded lobotomy patients who quite often kill themselves, and as the difficulty goes up the enemies don't become any smarter but rather gain superhuman reflexes and accuracy, which isn't a whole bag of fun. On high difficulty it becomes literally impossible to play the game with low health since the enemies will take you out the instant you walk around a corner.

The game shipped with a reasonably complete multiplayer mode, and no doubt Monolith hoped it would join the list of games that lacked single player appeal but become multiplayer hits (Quake comes to mind here). Unfortunately multiplayer games proved laggy and unstable, and the server set up for the game was soon taken down through lack of activity.

They couldn't even get the gibbing right! When you stab someone with a knife or blow them up with a missile, the result is exactly the same: their limbs go flying off at weird angles and their torso disintegrates. And you can kick severed heads around like before, but not even this is as fun as in the original.

The Bottom Line
Blood 2 is totally worthless as a sequel and a game. It was junk when it came out and today you need to play it like you need an axewound to your skull. This isn't a game you should avoid. This is a game you should simply ignore.

Windows · by Maw (833) · 2007

Quintessentially mediocre

The Good
The original 'Blood' was one of the more interesting late-period Build Engine games; the Lovecraftian setting, dark humour and indeed dark darkness helped it stand out from the many other, lesser titles which were around at the time ('Redneck Rampage', for example). Granted, a lot of this fond remembrance is attributable to pleasant surprise at Blood's competence rather than genuine affection for its brilliance, but it was entertaining enough. The sequel is, however, strikingly mediocre, almost to the extent of being a dictionary definition of that word; never offensively bad, it merely exists, and vanished without a trace at the time, having the terrible misfortune to come out at the same time as 'Half-Life', indeed it was reviewed in the same magazines.

In its favour, the 'Lithtech' engine - fresh from the much more impressive 'Shogo: Mobile Armoured Division' - was as attractive as that of 'Unreal'. Unlike 'Sin', which had a lot of promise but was also overshadowed by 'Half-Life', it didn't require an enormous patch to get it working properly.

The Bad
Ah. The first Blood got by on its atmosphere, the references to H P Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos, the dark jokes ("Mimes. I hate mimes.") and so forth. Blood 2 has nothing of this; the setting has nods to George Romero's 'Day of the Dead', and there are face-hugger-esque creatures - but it's mostly a lot of bland sci-fi corridors and concrete downtown areas, totally generic. The storyline begs you to skip past it, and the game adds nothing new or novel to the FPS genre. As mentioned earlier, it was devoured by 'Half-Life', which made it look silly in almost every possible way, from the latter's sense of genuine menace and danger, to its grown-up writing, sympathetic characters, and killer little touches.

The Bottom Line
I really had to drudge my memory to write this review, as I've forgotten almost everything about Blood 2; that's why I remember it, paradoxically, because it's a quintessentially forgettable game, a good example of how something can enter the world and depart without leaving a trace behind. If it had been a pop group, it would have been Brother Beyond, or Club Nouveau, or Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. The Escape Club. Amy Grant. Any of those people. It killed the 'Blood' franchise stone dead.

Windows · by Ashley Pomeroy (225) · 2005

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

Credits

The final credits scroll of the first release contained anti-credits that made fun of people the Monolith staff didn't like. GT Interactive made them remove this in later releases and they are were also cut out by the first patch (which is pretty much required to get the game to run correctly).

German index

On November 30, 1999, Blood II: The Chosen was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. More information about what this means can be found in the description.

Humour

Blood II: The Chosen contains a lot of generic and cliche'd FPS elements, and the designers are self-consciously aware of this, including jokes such as a mission briefing that tells you to "push some buttons and kill some things" (that's really what it says, word for word), and a huge glowing sign advertising "Silver Key Industries."

Open Source release

As of 2005, Blood II: The Chosen is open source and its full code can be downloaded from the Blood 2 homepage.

References

There is a secret room in one of the levels parodying Unreal. It has a picture of a leaping Skaarj Warrior on the wall and the inscription: "I [heart] Skaarj".

Information also contributed by Maw Mickey Gabel and Xoleras

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Chosen 2
Released 2017 on Windows
The Chosen RPG
Released 2016 on Windows
NBA Ballers: Chosen One
Released 2008 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
The Chosen: Well of Souls
Released 2006 on Windows
Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child
Released 2009 on Windows, Macintosh, 2012 on iPad
XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
Released 2017 on Linux, Windows, Macintosh...
Dragon's Dogma: Notice Board Quests - The Chosen
Released 2012 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen
Released 2007 on Nintendo DS, 2014 on Android, iPhone

Related Sites +

  • Blood 2: The Chosen
    Official game website
  • PlanetBlood
    Featuring downloads, reviews, hosted sites, fan fiction/art... just about everything that has to do with Blood 1 and 2. The perfect site for any Bloodite.
  • The Blood Wiki
    The Blood Wiki, a wiki devoted to the first-person shooter game Blood, its sequel Blood II: The Chosen, and their respective expansion packs. Also available is information on the various mods, fan projects, development details, and the fictional world in which Caleb and the others live in.
  • The Postmortem
    Sort of a monument-like fansite built for Blood and Blood II: The Chosen to keep it's soul alive for the next generation of Bloodites.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 1150
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Derrick 'Knight' Steele.

Additional contributors: Kate Jones, Andrew Hartnett, ClydeFrog, Dae, oct, Patrick Bregger, Titan10.

Game added March 26, 2000. Last modified March 6, 2024.