When you play a lot of games, it’s easy to forget the staggering level of work that goes into game development. You expect guns to go bang and enemies to fall over, and that seems easy enough, but every sound and reaction effect needs to be purpose-built to feel satisfying and suit the game’s tone. Every weapon needs an entire suite of secondary animations, like trying to shoot without ammo or using an alternative fire mode. Enemies should react differently to being shot, set on fire, or electrocuted, so the complexity multiplies with every new weapon and enemy type. Having variety and reactivity in this way is a massive undertaking, but Blood proves how polish in these areas can elevate a game to greatness. In most shooters you get a boring handgun by default, but here, you get a flare gun. It doesn’t just set enemies on fire when you hit them, it fizzles menacingly until they burst into flames and start flailing wildly. You might expect to get a hunting rifle for long distances, but in Blood you get a voodoo doll, sadistically jabbing it to take down enemies. The focus is on B-movie horror brutality, but it’s done in such a tongue-in-cheek way that it never feels mean spirited. You’re just there to have a good time sprinting at the insane speed of a 90’s shooter protagonist, blasting cultists with some of the most satisfying weapons ever put into a computer game. The cherry on the top is the custom difficulty system, which lets you tweak the game to whatever you find the most fun. There’s the usual damage modifiers for you and the enemies, but also settings for enemy counts and aggression levels for each type. You can make it a run-and-gun with hordes of weak enemies, or a horror shooter where you have to be careful with your resources. As long as you enjoy shooters, you can have fun with Blood. Since a rerelease took until 2019 and it never got a quality sequel, it’s been criminally overlooked, so I encourage even the shooter skeptics out there to rediscover this classic.