Blood

The Good
Blood is a game that is considered along with Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior to be the holy trinity of Build engine FPS games. I discovered the game several years ago via the website Home of the Underdogs, a great website full of underrated PC games, definitely check it out.

In Blood, you play as Caleb. An Old West gunslinger who used to be part of the Chosen, the elite enforcers of the Cabal, a sinister cult who worship a dark god named Tchernobog. One day, Caleb, his girlfriend Ophelia and the rest of the Chosen are summoned to Tchernobog. Instead of gaining immortality and ultimate power, Caleb is forced to watch as his love and friends get slaughtered by Tchernobog and his minions. Caleb himself gets exiled and put to rot inside a hollow, cold grave. Several decades later, Caleb somehow comes back to life, seeking answers and above all else, bloody revenge!

Like I mentioned before, Blood uses the Build engine made famous in Duke Nukem 3D. Like Duke3D, Blood puts a strong emphasis on varied weapons and enemies as well as huge, highly detailed levels. Blood mostly takes place in real-life locations such as a cemetery, a hospital, a besieged city and even a moving train. There are also some more bizarre locations. One of the final levels in the game is called "in the flesh" and consists of Caleb moving through a living, breathing and occasionally bleeding creature. Furthermore, the environment reacts to what you are doing. Shoot the walls and bullet holes appear, statues and paintings can be destroyed in order to reveal hidden stashes, etc.

The first level, for instance, takes place at a cemetery. You start the level in your crypt and go through the graveyard, blowing up zombies "freshly" risen from the grave. After that, you will enter the memorial church and eventually the cremation room. Another level is one huge tribute to the horror movie (and novel) The Shining. It takes place in the Overlooked Hotel, complete with hallways, bedrooms, secret passages and a hedge maze. If you look hard enough, you can even find the Redrum writings and Jack Torrance's frozen corpse!

Level design aside, one of Blood biggest strengths, in my opinion, lies in its original weapon arsenal. In Blood you have some typical FPS weapons like a shotgun and a rocket launcher (changed to a napalm launcher) but you also get stuff like a flare pistol, an aerosol can makeshift flamethrower and even a voodoo doll (my personal favorite, by the way). Your melee weapon in this game is not a fist or a knife, but a freaking pitchfork. Ideal for stabbing those hapless mimes between the ribs! Not only that, but almost every weapon has an alternative firing mode. For example, the double-barreled sawed-off shotgun can fire either one barrel at the time or both at once for an awesome sounding BLUUUAAAAM!

The enemies themselves are also pretty original. You have typical horror enemies like zombies, psychopathic cultists and gargoyles but also walking hands, hell hounds and even fish like humans with shark heads (you have to see it to believe it). Some enemies will run, crawl or swim straight towards you to stab or bite you, others will shoot you and even others fade in and out of existence to slice you in half. In addition, the enemies are very challenging to fight against, particularly on the higher difficulties. Not only you get to fight more foes, but also because they get new abilities. The cultists, for example, will throw dynamite at you as well as strafing and crouching more often if you choose a harder difficulty level. Simply put, every enemy will test your skills and will require you to use different tactics to overcome the odds.

The game's audio and music also deserve as much or even more praise than its atmosphere. Zombies mumble stuff like "brains," cultists speak bizarre gibberish and the phantoms screams will pierce through your eardrums. Shoot enemies and they will scream out in pain. Set them on fire and they will shout "it burns, it burns" before falling apart into a tiny, smoldering pile of ash. All the weapons sound great and hearing blood dripping to the ground or the pitchfork penetrating flesh is awesomely gruesome. Music-wise, Blood is a far cry from typical game music. No rock, techno or orchestra themes, but ambient sounds like moaning, clock ticking or spiritual chants. It certainly adds to Blood's dark, morbid setting.

Caleb himself, and his voice actor Stephan Weyte, definitely deserve acclaim. Caleb really steals the show as he, like his Build bros Duke Nukem and Lo Wang, loves to comment on everything he sees and does. Enter the hospital level, and he says "I'm here to donate some blood, someone else's." Finish off the final boss and Caleb mutters "good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun." Caleb is pretty much an undead version of Dirty Harry as he has little shows little care for anything but his own issues. He is very morally ambiguous as he is pretty much as violent and psychotic as the cult he fights against. Blow enemies up and he will laugh maniacally, shoot a mime standing around and he will coolly say "I hate mimes." Still, Caleb is a joy to play with and you will constantly wonder what is next in store for him to kill and comment on.

Blood is like a huge love letter to classic horror fans. You will certainly recognize stuff from movies like The Evil Dead, Friday The 13th and Jaws. I do have to say that the game scared me little and that is exactly what the developers intended to do with this game. It uses horror and violence in such an absurd and exaggerated way that it becomes funny and just very entertaining. Like Duke3D, Blood is a game made by gamers for gamers with creativity and overall gaming pleasure put well above making money.

And of course, for a game named after the red liquid that flows through all our bodies, the game has a ton of blood and gore. Every kill is bloody and ultra violent. Throw dynamite to a zombie or cultist and watch as the blood, limbs, organs and other chunks of flesh get scattered all over the place. Shoot them with a shotgun next to a wall and see the blood slowly ooze all over the wall. Shoot enemies with a flare gun and watch them go out in flames. Use the voodoo doll and enemies turn to dust, literally!

The Bad
Like typical 90s shooters, Blood can be brutally hard at times. More often than not, you will enter a seemingly empty room only to get shot in the back by a cultist hiding in the corner or to have a horde of axe-wielding zombies appear from behind a fake wall.

The game's graphics, while detailed, are also very low resolution. Even on higher resolution settings, the game is pretty blurry, particularly the textures. I do have to say that these low res graphics certainly add to the game's B-movie style.

The Bottom Line
For me, Blood, alongside Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D can be considered the swan song of the 2.5D shooter genre. And along with these other two games, I can certainly recommend you all to give this game a go. Especially if you are looking for a bloody good game (no pun intended) to play for the Halloween season! Now go get your hands bloody!

The Good
It's probably immediately obvious from the game's title that this isn't exactly a game for the sensitive, but I'll go through the usual caveat anyway. Blood is one of the most violent games ever made, certainly the most violent I've ever played. There's so much red stuff in this game you wonder if it affected the developers' vision. You can shoot limbs off bodies, aim at heads and watch them explode like cans of tomato soup, and splatter gore over the walls when you blast enemies to their component parts with the sawed-off shotgun. Along the way of your blood-soaked journey you'll frequently encounter mutilated human bodies nailed to the walls: some of them are still twitching. The game's violence is so over-the-top and campy it isn't really scary or disturbing -- quite the opposite -- but it's still the reason many people should avoid this game. But those who can handle the ultra violence will find a fun and memorable shooter.

The story: at the age of 18, Caleb already has a reputation as a merciless gunfighter in the mid-1840s American West. He comes across a destroyed homestead and a weeping woman, who tells him that her name is Ophelia and her husband and everything she had was destroyed by a cult of demon-worshippers called the Cabal. Her husband had been a member of the Cabal, but had tried to escape from it, and retaliation had been swift. Tearfully, she asks him if he wants to join the Cabal, and for some damned reason he accepts. The demon the Cabal serves, Tchernobog: The One That Binds; The Sleeping God; yadda yadda, invites a select few of his followers to a secret ceremony. There, he kills everyone, (including Caleb and Ophelia) and uses their power to augment his own. But Caleb survives (well, not really, he dies and gets resurrected. The game never tells us how), and from there on the plot unfolds along fairly familiar lines. Caleb sets out for revenge on Tchernobog and his army of followers, and hopefully I don't have to explain anything else about Blood's story.

The first thing that struck me about Blood was its incredible detail. Get up close to the walls, and you can actually see small details like fungus and slime in the brickwork. Your enemies have several death animations each (one from getting shot dead-on, another from getting shot from the side, another from getting burned alive, etc.), and, true to Ken Silverman's Build engine, you can destroy, move, or interact with almost everything. It's one thing shooting exploding barrels in Doom, but in Blood you can do things like crush enemies by pushing a wooden crate off a ledge on to them, and kick decapitated enemy heads around like footballs. Blood is an insidiously fun, destructive game.

Blood is technologically adept, featuring things such as transparent water, realistic lighting, and great physics. The Build engine is probably the most advanced 2.5D engine ever developed, and Blood takes full advantage of this with things like rooms above rooms (the game's most tense moment is when you're walking a treacherously narrow causeway across a pit of snakes). As far as visual appeal goes the game falls a bit flat, the sprites get pixely and blurred when you get up close (but that's true of every raycast game) and the colours seem a bit bland and washed out. The game is using very old technology and it shows. But the game's system requirements are certainly modest, and I haven't encountered a single bug or glitch while playing -- not even on Windows XP, which apparently is the bane of Build games.

The game's levels (for the most part) are simply awesome. I really pity anyone who is trying to create a mod of Blood 2, all the good ideas have already been used in the game. Rather than just endless levels that take place in a dungeon or building, you'll blast enemies to shreds in locales such as on board a ship, in an abandoned amusement park, and in a snow-covered forest. The design of the levels is top notch, with a good balance of puzzles that require thinking and areas that you can just blast your way through, there are blessfully few "fetch the silver key" style puzzles, although completing some levels usually entails unlocking a secret area somewhere. The weapons are diverse and satisfying. Some enemies are resistant to certain weapon types, so you'll have to be prepared to switch around a lot. Of course, there's the requisite shotgun and pistol, and a few more unusual things like the aerasol spray can and the voodoo doll. I liked it how you could dual wield, with a weapon in each hand. The monsters, I'll admit, are unremarkable, mostly just copies of those from Doom and Quake, with a few rats, bats and spiders thrown in for good measure. But in all fairness they are extremely detailed and have so many different animations that it almost makes up for the fact that Monolith is firing creative blanks.

Blood's multiplayer, I think, deserves its own section. The server Monolith had set up for the game (games.lith.com) was taken down years ago, but as with almost all popular titles that have been abandoned by their developers new servers have been set up elsewhere by fans. Bloodbath (as multiplayer mode is affectionately known) is as exciting as multiplayer FPS games can get. There are just so many varied weapons and powerups, (not to mention Blood's naturally flexible engine that allows for things like bouncing grenades off walls to kill enemy players that are hiding behind corners) that Bloodbath mode kept me entertained for weeks after beating the game in single player mode. The game comes with 9 excellent multiplayer levels, and there's even a utility on the install CD that allows you to create your own.

And of course, there's the humour. There are the obligatory wisecracks from our protagonist (when entering a hospital Caleb will remark "hmmm...a hospital. I might donate someone elses blood.") and things such as the "No Zombies Allowed" sign at the amusement park. There are so many references to H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe novels that the game's trivia section would probably be twice as large if someone went and documented them all. The game has a morbid "gallows humour" attitude that I quite liked, cue being able to kick zombie heads around. And there are those annoying people that run around incessantly screaming as zombies chase them. They're cute at first, but after a few levels I started ventilating their skulls with a bullet whenever I saw them just to shut them up.

The Bad
here are few things I can really fault Blood on. It aims at providing Doom-style action and succeeds very well at that. The excessive gore is probably nothing more than an attempt to distinguish it from the crowd (there's no such thing as bad press, so the saying goes.) One thing I didn't like was that the game often falls back on jumping puzzles. Jumping puzzles shouldn't really be in FPS games, you can't see your feet and it's little more than an exercise in frustration because of that. A lot of E4L2 is just jumping from wooden pylon to wooden pylon over a pit of lava, and I believe I died more times in that part than in all the other parts of the game put together. That was the only time I was genuinely frustrated with Blood.

The Bottom Line
Other than the violence hook, Blood is a neat little game and a good example of the genre. Recommended if you've got a high gore tolerance and you can find it.

The Good
Blood is not a revolutionary game. But it did have the most unusual plot I have ever seen in a FPS. Let me start with level design, for you traverse many real-world locations I have yet to see duplicated in any other FPS. The weapon selection is better than in any other FPS ever made, for where else could you use an aerosol can or flare gun to set your enemies on fire and watch them scream, "It burns!" The enemies are also memorable, for you have cultists which shout Latin-Sanskrit phrases at you (which have real English translations), and zombies who emerge from the ground and say "More Brains." The graphics, while considered poor by today's standards, (though I like them) do add a certain atmosphere to the game. Also, the one-liners from Caleb, Blood's protagonist, are what set it apart from others of the same genre.

The Bad
The bosses are to easy to defeat. Shial is quite scary though. The violence in Blood is intense, so if you do not like violent video games stay away from this one.

The Bottom Line
One of the best FPS around. Much better than Duke Nukem 3-D. Find and play it, you are sure to have one of the best experiences ever in computer gaming.