Werewolf Yadda Yadda Earthblood is a giant mess of a game that would have been mediocre ten years ago and which today feels like someone forgot it in a drawer and decided to ship it well past its expiration date.
The Good:
Running around as a doggy is occasionally fun
The Bad:
Dated presentation - glitchy, boring stealth and combat - poor story and writing - a shallow power fantasy - plagiarizes things it should have left alone
----------------------
Playing the excessively titled "Werewolf: The Apocapypse - Earthblood" is like traveling back to 2009, and not in a good way: as a piece of software it cannot be defined in any way other than retrograde and even reactionary, with its willfull ignorance, or worse still its brazen disregard, for any and all conventions of modern gaming and the bare minimum of the improvements to gameplay systems, quality of life and storytelling achieved in the past decade and counting.
Earthblood tells the story of local biker cosplayer and professional blockhead Cahal, a werewolf gifted with the uncanny power to transform at will between man, wolf and lycanthrope without damaging his clothes in the process, and belonging to a tribe of similarly blockheaded kin. Cahal is a gruff, irritable brute (so irritable in fact that he had to take a five years sabbatical in order to cool down after his latest furry outburst, which cost a fellow wolfman his life, and during which sabbatical he neglected to even so much as text his daughter, because apparently phones do not exist in this world), who somehow still manages to be about as threatening as a puppy dog, more on that later. Cahal has a problem: an evil corporation is doing evil corporation things in his woods, and has got to stop them. That's about it when it comes to premise, and things never get much better later on, not even when the writers throw in multiple plot twists in order to make the fight more personal, without succeeding in the slightest, as it is basically impossible to care about any of these characters in any way.
As a pet peeve, I really dislike this modern werewolf fiction because it removes all of the curse aspects from the condition, there is absolutely no downside to it: these guys can instantaneously shift forms at will, as mentioned even retaining their clothes between shifts (I guess they turn into fur..?), with one of them even sporting a hilarious eyepatch when in lycan form, which makes him absolutely ridiculous. Just about the only issue is that when they get really really mad they might lose control and hurt those they weren't supposed to. Big whoop. At least a game like Vampyr, which you might look at as a significantly better equivalent to this, required the player to balance their bloodlust and sacrifice power to retain humanity. None of that here, it's just a dull, basic power fantasy with the depth of a puddle. There is also no effort made to give the villains any redeeming qualities in any way: they are just gleefully evil for the sake of it without even a hint of some grand machiavellian plan to save the world through evil means. They just like to kick puppies and baby seals for fun.
Visually we are looking at a real blast from the past: low polygon counts, blurry textures, basic animations and generally poor character models are everywhere. This detracts from the believability in more than one case: while Cahal's lycan form is suitably threatening (they put it on the main menu for a reason), his wolf form looks more like an adorable pupper than it does a ferocious wild animal, he's just so cuddly. Sound-wise there are some edgy-sounding metal songs which would feel at home in that bad Prince of Persia sequel, along with voice acting which, while mostly competent, won't send you writing home about it.
Gameplay-wise, Earthblood is presented as a stealth/action hybrid, which is a a difficult balancing act at the best of times, and here they failed entirely: essentially what this boils down to is entering enemy outposts and go from an encounter room to the next in incredibly linear fashion in order to go from point A to point B. Said rooms are entirely self-contained (an alert in one room won't affect enemy awareness in the following) and are structured as stealth puzzles where the trick is to do whatever the game expects from you without being spotted, usually reaching the exit on the other side. To do so, you can stealth kill enemies, turn into a wolf to attract attention by barking and crawl through vents, use computers to open doors, shut off and cameras and turrets, use a crossbow to silently dispatch enemies (ammunition for which is inexplicably lying around enemy bases despite no enemy using a crossbow), the works. All good on paper, except every single aspect of it is so poorly implemented, either by being badly designed, glitched or overpowered, that it invalidates whatever good ideas were in the design document.
For starters there is is a huge imbalance between the usefulness of wolf and human form: about the only advantage human Cahal has is to use his crossbow, but doing so is so slow and clunky (Cahal stands motionless after each shot until he's done reloading, which leaves him open to detection for several seconds) to render it less of an asset and more of a liability. He also is locked in sneaking mode at the game's discretion: Cahal can move at a slow walk or a brisk jog (no analog control, beyond these two speeds, which) when far from enemies, but whenever they are anywhere near he is forced into a crouched stance (again with only two speeds: slow and slower), whether the player desires it or not. This is especially aggravating when entering side rooms where enemies cannot possibly see or hear him, and the player is stuck slowly sneaking towards what he's trying to do. Apparently the developers didn't feel they could trust players with a crouch button.
By contrast, wolf form is lightning quick, nimble, harder to spot, can crawl through vents, dash silently forward, bark to attract attention and, if that weren't enough, has early upgrades to make it virtually invisible and highlight collectibles through walls from across the map using this game's version of Arkham's detective mode, all of which human form lacks. Most important, however, wolf form is not forced to sneak and can move freely. It becomes immediately apparent then how there is absolutely no reason to ever walk around as human Cahal.
Second, there are many occasional glitches getting in the way: sometimes you'll stealth kill an enemy by pulling him over a fence, hiding on the other side, only for the body to glitch through it and alert enemies that pass by. Other times a vent will glitch, preventing you from entering it, or the button press for a stealth kill will not register, causing an alert.
This would be a minor issue, since the game seems to intend for the player to quietly thin out enemy presence in a room before inevitably getting caught and transitioning to combat (you can even sabotage enemy spawn closets so they come out in a wounded state), a feeling compounded by the fact there are enemies that cannot be killed stealthily, making combat unavoidable in many scenarios. When the alert does start, one of two things will happen: 1) Cahal will sneak around like an idiot while everyone is yelling and shooting at him (remember the player cannot control his stance), eventually getting shot enough and going into a knocked out state with a quick button press prompt to transform into lycan, or 2) the player presses the transform button as soon as spotted and manually begins combat. Fighting is also very mediocre: this is a button masher combat system with short unfulfilling combos and very overpowered special moves to unlock and use by spending rage, a bar which can either be refilled by getting drunk on whiskey out of combat or beating enemies in combat.
You can also heal at any time, which is as unbalanced as it sounds: it's all too simple to dash away from danger and mash the corresponding button for a few seconds to get back to full health and fight on. Some enemies wield weapons loaded with silver bullets, which deal permanent damage which cannot be healed until the end of the combat encounter... unless you unlock the skill that negates the mechanic completely, making it a complete non-issue throughput the entirety of the game. Other skills consist in various roars and flurries of blows, which can tear the otherwise damage spongy enemies to shreds... even the bosses, which segues into the next issue of the game: it is too too easy.
Cahal is simply too powerful for his foes, who only present a challenge when many of the elite types are present and damage is pouring in from all sides in the barely decipherable chaos that happens on screen. Even so on the normal difficulty I only died one time the entire game, and that was during a particularly unfair boss fight, this game's version of Ornstein & Smough from Dark Souls. Barring that one, all of the bosses are pitifully easy, even the late game ones. Some of them take less time to dispatch than even some of the elite normal enemies you encounter in the levels. Combat is so tediously drawn-out and the same time easy that you'll sneak around just so you can avoid playing it, despite stealth being completely redundant.
To add a bit of meat on the bone there are a scant handful of sidequests you can undertake in the three hub areas the game is made of, usually consisting in "find five things" or "go back to the areas you already cleared and do them again". The latter needs no explanation as for why it's a chore, but the former also isn't done well: for instance in the first hub you need to find five spirits that can be seen using "detective mode", only these look identical to other, much more numerous spirits which serve no purpose at all, causing frustration. In the third hub you need to find five shrines, only the last one is inside the enemy base, and the game makes no effort to let you know you should move on, effectively wasting your time. To add insult to injury, the reward for these quests is hardly worth the effort: you'll usually get a single skill point (advanced skills quickly start to cost four of them), which can be much more quickly acquired by using the aforementioned skill to highlight collectibles through walls, rendering the sidequests redundant.
The best of the three areas is the second, in which for a moment the game becomes a lite version of Escape from Butcher Bay: Cahal infiltrates a prison complex and has to deal with the local fauna of mobsters and crooks in order to get what he needs. Sadly it's also the shortest part of the game.
There are conversations to be had with a few NPCs, featuring what passes for a dialogue tree (hilariously the player can cut these short by enraging mid sentence, starting combat) instead. Some areas will present you with a tutorial message explaining how you can blend in while in human form, which is ridiculous because a scientist on the bad guys' side sees this crossbow-wielding stinker of a man that Cahal is approach her in her secret lab and introduce himself as part of the corporate security team... and she buys it without question, letting his caveman brain swindle her into giving him hee all-access keycard. If, on the other hand, they see a lovable pup running around, they sound the alarm instantly. Go figure.
Sometimes an NPC will give you a task and immediately after you'll overhear enemy NPCs talking among themselves about the very thing you need. "Hey where did you leave that keycard? On that desk near the window?" How convenient!
The game also suffers from a generalized lack of polish and consideration: detective mode can only be activatedwhile standing perfectly still, which slows down the pace, text logs are too numerous and too long, probably in an attempt to stretch the playtime a little, but resulting in the player just wanting to skip them. One time I knocked the last enemy off a cliff, then Cahal started his transformation animation, which takes control away from you and evidently takes one step forward, as that send me careening off the same cliff to my death and the repeat of a fairly lengthy play session. In between enemy encounters the player will receive the obligatory radio calls from friendly NPCs, only these can be cancelled by interacting with something or reaching a point where a cutscene starts, cutting plot exposition short, which might be a blessing in disguise.
Lastly, the game sees fit to directly rip off one of the most memorable and beloved moments from the original Prey, and it fails miserably at it.
Werewolf Yadda Yadda Earthblood is a giant mess of a game that would have been mediocre ten years ago and which today feels like someone forgot it in a drawer and decided to ship it well past its expiration date. Considering its many flaws I can only recommend it to the most obsessive of furries and/or werewolf fans.
And I didn't make a single Young Frankenstein pun.
Oh all right: "Werewolf?" "There. There crappy game wolf".
The Good:
Running around as a doggy is occasionally fun
The Bad:
Dated presentation - glitchy, boring stealth and combat - poor story and writing - a shallow power fantasy - plagiarizes things it should have left alone
----------------------
Playing the excessively titled "Werewolf: The Apocapypse - Earthblood" is like traveling back to 2009, and not in a good way: as a piece of software it cannot be defined in any way other than retrograde and even reactionary, with its willfull ignorance, or worse still its brazen disregard, for any and all conventions of modern gaming and the bare minimum of the improvements to gameplay systems, quality of life and storytelling achieved in the past decade and counting.
Earthblood tells the story of local biker cosplayer and professional blockhead Cahal, a werewolf gifted with the uncanny power to transform at will between man, wolf and lycanthrope without damaging his clothes in the process, and belonging to a tribe of similarly blockheaded kin. Cahal is a gruff, irritable brute (so irritable in fact that he had to take a five years sabbatical in order to cool down after his latest furry outburst, which cost a fellow wolfman his life, and during which sabbatical he neglected to even so much as text his daughter, because apparently phones do not exist in this world), who somehow still manages to be about as threatening as a puppy dog, more on that later. Cahal has a problem: an evil corporation is doing evil corporation things in his woods, and has got to stop them. That's about it when it comes to premise, and things never get much better later on, not even when the writers throw in multiple plot twists in order to make the fight more personal, without succeeding in the slightest, as it is basically impossible to care about any of these characters in any way.
As a pet peeve, I really dislike this modern werewolf fiction because it removes all of the curse aspects from the condition, there is absolutely no downside to it: these guys can instantaneously shift forms at will, as mentioned even retaining their clothes between shifts (I guess they turn into fur..?), with one of them even sporting a hilarious eyepatch when in lycan form, which makes him absolutely ridiculous. Just about the only issue is that when they get really really mad they might lose control and hurt those they weren't supposed to. Big whoop. At least a game like Vampyr, which you might look at as a significantly better equivalent to this, required the player to balance their bloodlust and sacrifice power to retain humanity. None of that here, it's just a dull, basic power fantasy with the depth of a puddle. There is also no effort made to give the villains any redeeming qualities in any way: they are just gleefully evil for the sake of it without even a hint of some grand machiavellian plan to save the world through evil means. They just like to kick puppies and baby seals for fun.
Visually we are looking at a real blast from the past: low polygon counts, blurry textures, basic animations and generally poor character models are everywhere. This detracts from the believability in more than one case: while Cahal's lycan form is suitably threatening (they put it on the main menu for a reason), his wolf form looks more like an adorable pupper than it does a ferocious wild animal, he's just so cuddly. Sound-wise there are some edgy-sounding metal songs which would feel at home in that bad Prince of Persia sequel, along with voice acting which, while mostly competent, won't send you writing home about it.
Gameplay-wise, Earthblood is presented as a stealth/action hybrid, which is a a difficult balancing act at the best of times, and here they failed entirely: essentially what this boils down to is entering enemy outposts and go from an encounter room to the next in incredibly linear fashion in order to go from point A to point B. Said rooms are entirely self-contained (an alert in one room won't affect enemy awareness in the following) and are structured as stealth puzzles where the trick is to do whatever the game expects from you without being spotted, usually reaching the exit on the other side. To do so, you can stealth kill enemies, turn into a wolf to attract attention by barking and crawl through vents, use computers to open doors, shut off and cameras and turrets, use a crossbow to silently dispatch enemies (ammunition for which is inexplicably lying around enemy bases despite no enemy using a crossbow), the works. All good on paper, except every single aspect of it is so poorly implemented, either by being badly designed, glitched or overpowered, that it invalidates whatever good ideas were in the design document.
For starters there is is a huge imbalance between the usefulness of wolf and human form: about the only advantage human Cahal has is to use his crossbow, but doing so is so slow and clunky (Cahal stands motionless after each shot until he's done reloading, which leaves him open to detection for several seconds) to render it less of an asset and more of a liability. He also is locked in sneaking mode at the game's discretion: Cahal can move at a slow walk or a brisk jog (no analog control, beyond these two speeds, which) when far from enemies, but whenever they are anywhere near he is forced into a crouched stance (again with only two speeds: slow and slower), whether the player desires it or not. This is especially aggravating when entering side rooms where enemies cannot possibly see or hear him, and the player is stuck slowly sneaking towards what he's trying to do. Apparently the developers didn't feel they could trust players with a crouch button.
By contrast, wolf form is lightning quick, nimble, harder to spot, can crawl through vents, dash silently forward, bark to attract attention and, if that weren't enough, has early upgrades to make it virtually invisible and highlight collectibles through walls from across the map using this game's version of Arkham's detective mode, all of which human form lacks. Most important, however, wolf form is not forced to sneak and can move freely. It becomes immediately apparent then how there is absolutely no reason to ever walk around as human Cahal.
Second, there are many occasional glitches getting in the way: sometimes you'll stealth kill an enemy by pulling him over a fence, hiding on the other side, only for the body to glitch through it and alert enemies that pass by. Other times a vent will glitch, preventing you from entering it, or the button press for a stealth kill will not register, causing an alert.
This would be a minor issue, since the game seems to intend for the player to quietly thin out enemy presence in a room before inevitably getting caught and transitioning to combat (you can even sabotage enemy spawn closets so they come out in a wounded state), a feeling compounded by the fact there are enemies that cannot be killed stealthily, making combat unavoidable in many scenarios. When the alert does start, one of two things will happen: 1) Cahal will sneak around like an idiot while everyone is yelling and shooting at him (remember the player cannot control his stance), eventually getting shot enough and going into a knocked out state with a quick button press prompt to transform into lycan, or 2) the player presses the transform button as soon as spotted and manually begins combat. Fighting is also very mediocre: this is a button masher combat system with short unfulfilling combos and very overpowered special moves to unlock and use by spending rage, a bar which can either be refilled by getting drunk on whiskey out of combat or beating enemies in combat.
You can also heal at any time, which is as unbalanced as it sounds: it's all too simple to dash away from danger and mash the corresponding button for a few seconds to get back to full health and fight on. Some enemies wield weapons loaded with silver bullets, which deal permanent damage which cannot be healed until the end of the combat encounter... unless you unlock the skill that negates the mechanic completely, making it a complete non-issue throughput the entirety of the game. Other skills consist in various roars and flurries of blows, which can tear the otherwise damage spongy enemies to shreds... even the bosses, which segues into the next issue of the game: it is too too easy.
Cahal is simply too powerful for his foes, who only present a challenge when many of the elite types are present and damage is pouring in from all sides in the barely decipherable chaos that happens on screen. Even so on the normal difficulty I only died one time the entire game, and that was during a particularly unfair boss fight, this game's version of Ornstein & Smough from Dark Souls. Barring that one, all of the bosses are pitifully easy, even the late game ones. Some of them take less time to dispatch than even some of the elite normal enemies you encounter in the levels. Combat is so tediously drawn-out and the same time easy that you'll sneak around just so you can avoid playing it, despite stealth being completely redundant.
To add a bit of meat on the bone there are a scant handful of sidequests you can undertake in the three hub areas the game is made of, usually consisting in "find five things" or "go back to the areas you already cleared and do them again". The latter needs no explanation as for why it's a chore, but the former also isn't done well: for instance in the first hub you need to find five spirits that can be seen using "detective mode", only these look identical to other, much more numerous spirits which serve no purpose at all, causing frustration. In the third hub you need to find five shrines, only the last one is inside the enemy base, and the game makes no effort to let you know you should move on, effectively wasting your time. To add insult to injury, the reward for these quests is hardly worth the effort: you'll usually get a single skill point (advanced skills quickly start to cost four of them), which can be much more quickly acquired by using the aforementioned skill to highlight collectibles through walls, rendering the sidequests redundant.
The best of the three areas is the second, in which for a moment the game becomes a lite version of Escape from Butcher Bay: Cahal infiltrates a prison complex and has to deal with the local fauna of mobsters and crooks in order to get what he needs. Sadly it's also the shortest part of the game.
There are conversations to be had with a few NPCs, featuring what passes for a dialogue tree (hilariously the player can cut these short by enraging mid sentence, starting combat) instead. Some areas will present you with a tutorial message explaining how you can blend in while in human form, which is ridiculous because a scientist on the bad guys' side sees this crossbow-wielding stinker of a man that Cahal is approach her in her secret lab and introduce himself as part of the corporate security team... and she buys it without question, letting his caveman brain swindle her into giving him hee all-access keycard. If, on the other hand, they see a lovable pup running around, they sound the alarm instantly. Go figure.
Sometimes an NPC will give you a task and immediately after you'll overhear enemy NPCs talking among themselves about the very thing you need. "Hey where did you leave that keycard? On that desk near the window?" How convenient!
The game also suffers from a generalized lack of polish and consideration: detective mode can only be activatedwhile standing perfectly still, which slows down the pace, text logs are too numerous and too long, probably in an attempt to stretch the playtime a little, but resulting in the player just wanting to skip them. One time I knocked the last enemy off a cliff, then Cahal started his transformation animation, which takes control away from you and evidently takes one step forward, as that send me careening off the same cliff to my death and the repeat of a fairly lengthy play session. In between enemy encounters the player will receive the obligatory radio calls from friendly NPCs, only these can be cancelled by interacting with something or reaching a point where a cutscene starts, cutting plot exposition short, which might be a blessing in disguise.
Lastly, the game sees fit to directly rip off one of the most memorable and beloved moments from the original Prey, and it fails miserably at it.
Werewolf Yadda Yadda Earthblood is a giant mess of a game that would have been mediocre ten years ago and which today feels like someone forgot it in a drawer and decided to ship it well past its expiration date. Considering its many flaws I can only recommend it to the most obsessive of furries and/or werewolf fans.
And I didn't make a single Young Frankenstein pun.
Oh all right: "Werewolf?" "There. There crappy game wolf".
لينك مراجعتي على يوتيوب :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k75ssBDM7ok&t=83s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k75ssBDM7ok&t=83s
If you were to have me write this review based on the first two hours of playing this game, I would have given it a 1 - 1.5. But something happened around the halfway point, call it enlightenment or call it Stockholm Syndrome, even I'm not quite sure.
You have to be ready to just handwave a whole bunch of janky nonsense in order to begin to appreciate the good elements of Werewolf. It has absolutely unnecessary RPG elements complete with Mass Effect-esque radial dialogue choices, a totally half-baked Stealth mechanic that frustrates way more than excites, and the samey environments get stale within the first hour. But, man, let me tell you? It's fun to hit that Enrage button and tear up a room full of soldiers, every time.
And that's where the Stockholm Syndrome starts to kick in, because by the end, once I stopped caring about quality and started focusing on fun, I actually found myself sorta invested the the D-Movie plotline, and Cahal's revenge mission. I found myself playing by the game's rules, attempting to overcome the shoddy stealth mechanic, knowing that if and when it inevitably came crashing down I could always just hit Enrage and go berserk. I have no idea how it happened, but when it was all said and done, I'm gonna be honest, I actually kinda liked this game.
You have to be ready to just handwave a whole bunch of janky nonsense in order to begin to appreciate the good elements of Werewolf. It has absolutely unnecessary RPG elements complete with Mass Effect-esque radial dialogue choices, a totally half-baked Stealth mechanic that frustrates way more than excites, and the samey environments get stale within the first hour. But, man, let me tell you? It's fun to hit that Enrage button and tear up a room full of soldiers, every time.
And that's where the Stockholm Syndrome starts to kick in, because by the end, once I stopped caring about quality and started focusing on fun, I actually found myself sorta invested the the D-Movie plotline, and Cahal's revenge mission. I found myself playing by the game's rules, attempting to overcome the shoddy stealth mechanic, knowing that if and when it inevitably came crashing down I could always just hit Enrage and go berserk. I have no idea how it happened, but when it was all said and done, I'm gonna be honest, I actually kinda liked this game.
This game has a cool concept but it's just a dull button masher.
Stealth sections exist but literally you aren't punished for getting caught after the tutorial mission so I just would get caught and fight my way through most levels
I got bored and kept almost falling asleep while playing, not a fan.
Stealth sections exist but literally you aren't punished for getting caught after the tutorial mission so I just would get caught and fight my way through most levels
I got bored and kept almost falling asleep while playing, not a fan.
The World of Darkness setting lends itself to different mediums, and the one of video games has only been tread lightly with Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Unlike that, Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is pure schlock. It's a game with a broken yet persistent stealth system, a straight-to-video story, and an attitude that belongs in 2012 despite dropping in February of this year. And that's why I had a good deal of fun with it.
You get to kill capitalists as a doggo
I'm a sucker for Werewolves so I thought HMMM Maybe this could be a fun game, and after I finished it.............EAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, it's not god awful but it's not all that good either.
The story sucks, the characters are bland and unmemorable, and the models look fuck ugly.
The only saving grace game gave to me was the combat.
I'm not gonna say that it's better than God of War, but it's very 2009 and 2000's hack and slashes are my fucking jam. While the combat did get repetitive near the last level I still enjoyed the game overall.
I can't say I didn't have an awful time with this game but I'll probably forget this game even came out in like 3 months.
The story sucks, the characters are bland and unmemorable, and the models look fuck ugly.
The only saving grace game gave to me was the combat.
I'm not gonna say that it's better than God of War, but it's very 2009 and 2000's hack and slashes are my fucking jam. While the combat did get repetitive near the last level I still enjoyed the game overall.
I can't say I didn't have an awful time with this game but I'll probably forget this game even came out in like 3 months.
this game sucks ass, please stop making werewolf the apocalpyse content i am begging you paradox