Blood

The Good
(Like my Hexen review, this is an old review I've restored. It was written for a college mag a friend and I started in '96, so please don't go WTF when I make dated references.)

1997 has been a slow year for us gamers, maybe because we're all hotly anticipating ID's Quake II and other big names such as StarCraft . Yet I finally have a shooter to sink my teeth into, and be prepared for a shock: I like it better than Quake and I think its easily the best shoot 'em up since the legendary Doom. What interested me in Doom was its setting, I love horror and I love my blood and guts, so blasting hellish monsters appealed. Blood attracted my attention while walking through the game store because of its dark cover, simply showing a classic bloody hand print and a simple enough name.

That simple name tells you all you need to know about the game, there is blood. Lots and lots of Blood. This is easily the bloodiest game I've played, and while that means it isn't for the squeamish, it brings a lot of catharsis and excitement for someone who wants to blow off stress. In many ways the premise is similar to Doom, shooting zombies and hellish minions, but whats different is instead of being set in space, Blood is set in a strange, somewhat surreal version of the 1920's owned by an evil cult. The setting is awesome, and so is the main character, Caleb. Caleb is an undead cowboy who wants to kill a demon god. So yeah, basically his level of awesomeness is on that of Bruce Campbell. This makes him a compelling protagonist and his sick sense of humour is refreshing for those who like bleak and morbid humour.

Gameplay is much like Doom, but enhanced. I actually decided to pass up on Duke Nukem so I'm new to the Build engine. Many of the restraints of Doom are gone, rooms are more realistic with multiple levels, special walls that can be blown apart, and interactivity with objects. Various dark jokes can be found, but even better than the dark jokes, are various references and tributes to H.P. Lovecraft. As a fan of his writings and owing him thanks for my namesake "The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath," I always get a smile on my face when I find a tribute to his writings. The game also has various references to horror movies, and has a tributes and references to movies such as "The Evil Dead" and "The Exorcist." Finding these references are a joy for literature fans as well as horror movie fans.

Weapons range from dynamite, flare guns, Tommy guns (!), and my favourite, the voodoo doll. Did I mention this game was gory? Each weapon makes minced meat out of your foes in different ways, the flare gun will set them on fire and burn their flesh off. The Tommy guns will leave you with something resembling Swiss cheese. There are power ups that let you dual wield weapons and more. This adds for a lot of variety and fun with the weapons. The engine is great, and while I'm sure there have been games like this before, this is my first exposure to a shooter with such variety and interactive environments.

Each episode gets better and better, but that's what one would expect. The game is for hardcore shooter fans only, the difficulty is insane even on "Easy" mode for some. Blood brings back memories of the difficulty of playing "Thy Flesh Consumed" from Ultimate Doom on Ultra Violence. The games AI is also fierce and smart, as well as having great variety. Zombies are great at tricking you, they'll go down but sometimes get back up and follow you. On the harder difficulty levels, you'll learn to make sure to take their head off, that's the only way next to burning them or gibbing them to keep them down. The developers put great thought into the demonic enemies, and this spices up the encounters.

While not as intense as Quake, the multiplayer is fun. What makes it above average is simply the games twisted weapons and the fact that this has to be the only game where you can twist your foes head off with a voodoo doll, and some of the maps have traps that will give you a shock and an upper hand once you figure them out. If you have the game, feel free to set up a game with me.

The soundtrack is very moody. It sounds creepy and despite the dark humour that keeps the game from truly being 100% horror, the soundtrack has some very unique CD music that will send chills. The soundtrack stands out amongst other games like this, and some of the instruments used will raise an eyebrow, but in a good way. The rest of the game sounds great as well, there are tons of great screams and sound effects that compliment the brutal setting and make levels feel realistic. Monsters make various noises, both funny and scary. Much like "Evil Dead," the game is both scary and utterly hysterical. The developers have set up a great soundscape here.

The level design is great, and levels will take you through many dark and strange places. From a hilariously twisted carnival to a Frankenstein like laboratory filled with sick, acid vomiting zombies and severed and possessed hands seeking the first undead cowboys neck they can get a hold of. The soundscapes have sound effects that will keep you in the settings and they feel like real locations.

The Bad
The graphics, while not "bad," feel dated compared to Quake. The game uses sprites, and while the sprites are often detailed it can be jarring to switch from the smooth 3D world of Quake to the rough, heavily pixelated world of Blood. There are a few 3D models used for various objects in the world, but you'll sadly never see any 3D characters or weapons other than pickups. The upside however, assuming you can run it, is that Blood will run at massive resolutions. I played the game at 1024 x 768 and some of the games more impressive effects looked great.

As I said, the game is difficult. While I like this difficulty, there are times that it can be frustrating and sometimes I forgot to make a save and ended up returning halfway through a level. Others won't like this difficulty and if you aren't up for a brutish challenge, then you might want to avoid Blood.

Some of the level designs are somewhat obtuse and annoying. The heavy scripting usually works in the games favor, but other times it brings the game down. The game doesn't always tell you what to do or give you a clue of how to continue, and you'll be annoyed when you find out that you had to trigger some script or place dynamite in some strange place. Sometimes I got bored running in circles trying to trigger some stupid and needlessly cryptic event.

Sound Blaster fans beware, although the game supports the Sound Blaster line, there are various crashes that happened because of poor Sound Blaster integration. There's also stuttering at some times if you have a sound blaster and decide to use stereo sound or high number of voices. Hopefully this will be remedied, but only time will tell. Speaking of hardware issues, the year is 1997 and the game has no Windows 95 executable out of the box nor on the net. Anyone who is a long term gamer shouldn't have any trouble tinkering in Dos, and I know not everyone uses Windows, but I've gotten used to having Windows support and I felt that the game could've been optimized better for it.

The multiplayer only supports 8 players with no co-op. Maybe I've been spoiled by Quake, but I think that they could've upped the player cap to 16. 8 players is still great fun though, but those spoiled on Quake might like to double the player limit.

The music is good, but it does sometimes feel slow paced, and without the CD music it feels somewhat bland.

The Bottom Line
Blood is one of my favourite games of this year and easily the best shooter in years. I doubt it will replace Quake and the upcoming Quake II will likely muffle Blood, which is sad because the game is extremely fun. It is funny, it's creepy, and it pays great tribute to horror movies and literature as well as using a unique setting. If you like your guts, Blood delivers on that too. The unique weapons make multiplayer good enough to hold its own with Quake, and as always, Chie, Mike & I are always up for a good deathmatch on Saturdays, so feel free to bring your copy and play us. Blood isn't for the squeamish, but it's devilishly fun.

The Good
There's far too much to list here! First off, the sheer amount of stuff you can do in this game is amazing! You can blow huge parts of the environment up! Destroy and entire train! Meet JoJo the Idiot Boy! Kill mimes! Blast zombies and cultists apart and laugh as their blood rains upon your parade! Quote Evil Dead and Shakespeare! And more! I've never seen a 3D shooter with so much wit and charm before Blood came around!

Now, onward...your in-game persona, Caleb, has a unique and sadistic sense of humor. I even think he's a better character than Duke Nukem ever was, and I also love some of the lines he comes up with (especially his "I...LIVE...AGAIN!" when he rises from his grave in the first stage), most of which will draw a few chuckles from the player. Also, there is a wide variety of enemies in this game, all of which also have their cool ways about them (check out the evil hands!), and all of which have some pretty damn good AI about them. Third, your weapons. Man, what variety of tools of death and mayhem have you got at your disposal! I mean...what other 3D shooter lets you kill your enemies simply by stabbing a voodoo doll near them? Or even better yet...grabbing the awesome Guns Akimbo Power-Up and mowing a whole room of baddies with two Tommy guns? Speaking of Power-Ups...they're plentiful, and they're all totally cool.

Graphics and level design are top notch, and I love some of the more unique levels (like the carnival stage!) and the little touches Monolith put into them. All the graphics are excellent for this type of game (which reminds me...who says you need polygons to get great graphics?), and the color scheme (for the most part) feels appropriate.

Sounds and music are both absolutely amazing. The music especially is awesome because it's all recorded in Redbook Audio format and each piece has a cool, errie, creepy feeling about them. Great for Halloween! Sounds are mostly the normal fare: explosions, gunshots, screams, and a few others, but they're crisp and clear, and I love hearing the cultists scream in agony when I stab my voodoo doll in the heart and watch them crumble into dust in front of my eyes. All in all, hardly anything was wrong with this game, except...

The Bad
The game had one big problem going for it: it was shipped with a lot of bugs still left in the program. One especially annoying bug was the fact that Monolith had the FMV sequences played by putting the video in one file, and the audio in another. For a long time, neither would play, because Monolith couldn't align them right. There are a few others, such as the game being unable to loop the CD Audio music properly, leaving you with no music for about half a level sometimes, as well as a couple of tiny level bugs here and there (nothing major though).

The Bottom Line
Despite the nitpicky bugs, I wholeheartedly recommend that everyone who loves a good 3D shooter or a good horror flick grab this game if they see it. Too bad Blood 2 sucked (IMHO), and also that Monolith seems to have vanished as of lately. I'd love to see Blood 3 done, but done in the same vein as that which made Blood 1 such a joy to play, and one 3D shooter I'll never forget.

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.