Part of Spooky Season 2023.
What you see is what you get with Blood: a late 90s DOOM-inspired boomer shooter with a cheesy comedic horror tone that’s reminiscent of films like Sam Riami’s Army of Darkness. There’s even an enemy type that is literally just Ash’s possessed hand from Evil Dead 2. Blood wears its inspirations on its sleeves and manages to be a pretty decent time… depending on what difficulty you set the game to.
Blood can be brutal and not in a way that feels like an actual test of your skills. The game has an abundance of hit scanning enemies that can melt your health like butter from a rather far distance, before you can get a chance to register that they’re even there. I initially started off with the game’s second hardest difficulty “Well Done” and was struggling to get past the second level, so I decided to play the game on “Lightly Broiled” instead and I don’t regret my decision. Even on this difficulty there were some aspects of the game that just felt cheap, particularly the placements of enemies behind the corners of entryways. I got into the habit of quicksaving frequently just because the game loves to ambush you with dickish enemy placements quite often.
Despite this though, I had a pretty decent time with it. It has a solid arsenal of weapons that feel pretty fun to use. The enemies were alright, I feel like they were kind of lacking in terms of variety and design compared to something like DOOM or Quake. I wish more enemies had specific methods to effectively take them down, like using a combination of the Flare Gun and the Shotgun to dispatch Axe Zombies as quickly as possible. Most enemies are just weaker to specific weapons and that’s about it. The Gargoyles were extremely annoying. I hate how they fly higher than you can actually aim so you can’t really do anything about them until they land close enough to where you can shoot them. There’s also an enemy type here that shares my username - Phantasms. I was… never really clear on what these enemies are supposed to do besides annoy the hell out of you. It just charges at you and gets in your face while this really loud screaming sound effect plays over and over again. I couldn’t even tell if it was ever actually damaging me, I would just shoot it with the Shotgun whenever it stopped being intangible and never gave it a second thought.
I actually really enjoyed this game’s level design. I had a really great time making my way through the haunted mansions and various mazes in the game, it was really satisfying. I will say that some of the levels in Episode 3 were a little longer than I would’ve liked, especially E3M5: Spare Parts and E3M6: Monster Bait. I actually had to look up a walkthrough for these levels because I had no idea where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do at times.
The story is… there. It’s told over the course of very short cutscenes that usually play at the end of an episode. There’s not really a whole lot to it, and it ends extremely suddenly, making it very underwhelming. I was disappointed with the protagonist, Caleb too. He doesn’t talk nearly as much as I expected him to. I like him when he does talk, and I dig his personality being essentially Duke Nukem if he was a freaky black magic guy. But he’s pretty much silent unless you’re blowing stuff up with TNT, which is when he laughs maniacally.
Blood is a solid time as long as you’re not playing on the higher difficulties. I have to admit, I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it because I don’t think it really stands out all that much from other boomer shooters of its time. I love the horror aesthetic, I love all of the little pop culture references, the weapons and level designs are neat, and that’s about it, really. It’s a really standard title for the genre. I think if its horror aesthetic appeals to you, or if you’re just hungry for more classic DOOM-inspired FPS games from this point in time, then I think you’ll enjoy it. Otherwise, it’s definitely fun, but I don’t really know if I can say that it’s a must-play. Still, it’s a neat cult classic game, and the perfect October game if you’re ever looking for something horror-themed to play around this time of the year.
What you see is what you get with Blood: a late 90s DOOM-inspired boomer shooter with a cheesy comedic horror tone that’s reminiscent of films like Sam Riami’s Army of Darkness. There’s even an enemy type that is literally just Ash’s possessed hand from Evil Dead 2. Blood wears its inspirations on its sleeves and manages to be a pretty decent time… depending on what difficulty you set the game to.
Blood can be brutal and not in a way that feels like an actual test of your skills. The game has an abundance of hit scanning enemies that can melt your health like butter from a rather far distance, before you can get a chance to register that they’re even there. I initially started off with the game’s second hardest difficulty “Well Done” and was struggling to get past the second level, so I decided to play the game on “Lightly Broiled” instead and I don’t regret my decision. Even on this difficulty there were some aspects of the game that just felt cheap, particularly the placements of enemies behind the corners of entryways. I got into the habit of quicksaving frequently just because the game loves to ambush you with dickish enemy placements quite often.
Despite this though, I had a pretty decent time with it. It has a solid arsenal of weapons that feel pretty fun to use. The enemies were alright, I feel like they were kind of lacking in terms of variety and design compared to something like DOOM or Quake. I wish more enemies had specific methods to effectively take them down, like using a combination of the Flare Gun and the Shotgun to dispatch Axe Zombies as quickly as possible. Most enemies are just weaker to specific weapons and that’s about it. The Gargoyles were extremely annoying. I hate how they fly higher than you can actually aim so you can’t really do anything about them until they land close enough to where you can shoot them. There’s also an enemy type here that shares my username - Phantasms. I was… never really clear on what these enemies are supposed to do besides annoy the hell out of you. It just charges at you and gets in your face while this really loud screaming sound effect plays over and over again. I couldn’t even tell if it was ever actually damaging me, I would just shoot it with the Shotgun whenever it stopped being intangible and never gave it a second thought.
I actually really enjoyed this game’s level design. I had a really great time making my way through the haunted mansions and various mazes in the game, it was really satisfying. I will say that some of the levels in Episode 3 were a little longer than I would’ve liked, especially E3M5: Spare Parts and E3M6: Monster Bait. I actually had to look up a walkthrough for these levels because I had no idea where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do at times.
The story is… there. It’s told over the course of very short cutscenes that usually play at the end of an episode. There’s not really a whole lot to it, and it ends extremely suddenly, making it very underwhelming. I was disappointed with the protagonist, Caleb too. He doesn’t talk nearly as much as I expected him to. I like him when he does talk, and I dig his personality being essentially Duke Nukem if he was a freaky black magic guy. But he’s pretty much silent unless you’re blowing stuff up with TNT, which is when he laughs maniacally.
Blood is a solid time as long as you’re not playing on the higher difficulties. I have to admit, I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it because I don’t think it really stands out all that much from other boomer shooters of its time. I love the horror aesthetic, I love all of the little pop culture references, the weapons and level designs are neat, and that’s about it, really. It’s a really standard title for the genre. I think if its horror aesthetic appeals to you, or if you’re just hungry for more classic DOOM-inspired FPS games from this point in time, then I think you’ll enjoy it. Otherwise, it’s definitely fun, but I don’t really know if I can say that it’s a must-play. Still, it’s a neat cult classic game, and the perfect October game if you’re ever looking for something horror-themed to play around this time of the year.