Memorization-heavy peekaboo shooting is fun when the level design lends itself to that playstyle; otherwise it's a slog. When people talk about Blood, they talk about the cultists but never about the other enemies. There's a reason for that: they might as well not exist at all since strafing and/or crouching completely nullifies their (extremely slow and telegraphed) attacks. When the only credible threat in your roster is an overtuned one then you rely on the level design to do all the heavy lifting to try and shake things up in the long run.
For episode 1 and most of episode 2, it works. Mainly because the levels are very well-designed, pretty short as well as self-contained and thankfully the weapons in your arsenal encourage that kind of peekaboo shooting playstyle I mentioned earlier, Episode 3 onward is where things start to crumble. What once was the source of exhilaration becomes the source of frustration and eventually boredom. The levels become bigger so the crazy hitscanners more annoying to deal with, the other walking non-threats become tankier and come in greater numbers making them a slog to dispatch (Cheogh and Shial take the whole damn cake). Some levels are entirely devoid of cultists, those only serve to exacerbate Blood's main flaw as they are very much "nothing" levels as they lack any kind of challenge.

It's a shame because I love everything else about Blood but, due to an obvious lack of playtesting, the enemy balancing is so bad it ends up souring the whole dish. I played on Well Done because anything lower than that and the cultists become non-threatening too so not much point to it in my opinion.

Reviewed on Nov 07, 2023


2 Comments


5 months ago

Have you played F.E.A.R.? That entire game feels like just the cultists to me; I think Monolith learned their errors.

5 months ago

I have played F.E.A.R yes, I enjoyed it