Blood II: The Chosen

The Good
As you would know, this is the sequel to Blood, where the object of the game was for Caleb to face the Cabal and stop Tchernobog and his minions taking over the world. First of all before I go on about the game, I have to warn you: If you played the original FPS and you couldn't stand the violence, don't expect Blood 2: The Chosen to be less violent. In fact, you ask anyone if FPSes are getting more violent all the time, and they'll probably agree with you.

About the storyline, my memory is a little bit hazy so I'll tell you what I know. It's 2028, 100 years after the original events that took place in Blood, and the Cabal, the cult dedicated to worshipping the Dark God Tchernobog, plans to destroy Caleb and the other Chosen (Gabriella, Ishmael, Ophelia), who they call "The Great Betrayers". Furthermore, they are preparing to restore Tchernobog back to normal. The Cabal's leader, Gideon, is in charge of Cabalco, an organization that took control of the world's economic markets. He will do nothing but stop Caleb and the others.

In Blood, you only play Caleb as he goes from location to location to destroy the Dark God. In Blood 2, not only can you play Caleb, but you can play Gabriella, Ishmael, or Ophelia. The game is divided into four chapters, with eight levels each, and each level is packed with enemies that such as cultists, fanatics, zealots, shikaris, bone leeches, soul drudges, drudge lords, drudge priests, and more. The choking hand even makes a comeback, but they will say something other than "I'll swallow your soul". Gideon will also show his face throughout the game, taunting you with his threats. Enemies can transport from another dimension, more often than not in packs. To help you, you have access to 17 different weapons that include (but not limited to): The sawed-off shotgun, the .50 BMG Sniper Rifle, Howitzer, the Napalm launcher, and flare gun. You also have destructive weapons like the Flaregun, the Napalm Launcher, the voodoo doll, plus the proximity bomb and time bomb. Most of these weapons have an alternate firing mode and by pressing the X key on the keyboard, you can use these weapons to your advantage. You can only hold up to ten weapons at a time, so to carry new ones, you have to drop one. Some weapons are great, and others are crap. Each chapter ends with you fighting a boss, which are much bigger than you and your enemies, and once you've defeated each boss, the other three Chosen will appear before you one-by-one, and tell you what lies ahead. Behemoth, the boss you'll come face-to-face, requires quite a pounding from one of the weapons you pick up. I had no choice but to lose him as I explored other areas.

The levels also include exotic locations. Chapter One, for example, has you exploring transit systems, train stations, sewers, cathedrals, laboratories, and museums. Chapter Two lets you explore more subways and sewage treatment plants, and Chapter Three is where you're finally get close to the Cabal's headquarters. When you enter a new level, there is information about the level that appears on the loading screen, but most of them are advertisements from Cabalco itself. Each level also has an objective, which you can read by hitting the TAB key or whatever key you've assigned. Some areas in a level are dark and require a flashlight or night-vision goggles.

Also during your travels will you come across innocent people, who do their best not to make eye contact with you, and if they do, they will just swear at you. One of these people is a black chick wearing a green vest and black jeans, who does nothing but put her hands up and say "No No NoNoNo". I found her very annoying, that I felt like putting a bullet through her and leaving her for dead. Even the scientists and security guards in Half-Life are much more polite than this. Blood 2 uses Monolith's LithTech engine, a true 3D engine that provides great 3D modeling and the IMA sound system, described as "VERY cool dynamic music that sounds different every time you listen to it". Excuse me, I played Blood 2 more than twice, and to me, the music sounded the same every time I played it. Using the LithTech engine means that the sound and graphics have been improved a lot more than Blood, with 3D graphics and 3D stereo sound. You can also play the game at various resolutions.

Finally, did I mention that Blood 2 is more violent than the original? Monolith has increased the gore level in the game. I accidentally found myself shooting a dead enemy causing him to transform into a pool of blood.To demonstrate how violent the game really is, Monolith actually included a cheat which you can enter at the game's console to add even more gore to the game.

The Bad
Even on my Pentium 4, 1.8 Ghz, each level in Blood 2 takes a long time to load.

When I saved games then restore them at a later time, I immediately heard the dying sounds of the enemies.

Some levels are too dark to see anything that I am used to turning up my monitor's brightness and contrast settings, and pressing F11, like you do in most FPSes, just didn't work. I eventually found out how to adjust the game' gamma the hard way.

The Bottom Line
If you like the original game, then you love this game. If you want this game but haven't seen it, then try looking on eBay. ***

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.

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.