I could see this really hitting for someone else, but beyond the (admittedly very good) aesthetic I didn't feel compelled to play this game past the halfway point.

Exploration felt really underwhelming, with most floors feeling big just for the sake of being big, with little in the way of puzzles or meaningful hazards. Combat has a weird balance where pretty much every single regular encounter is completely trivial but around half the bosses/minibosses wiped me at least once, so I could never really tell if I was meant to be grinding or not.

I'm willing to believe that the game just has the most gentle difficulty curve in the entire genre, and it might work as a great entry point for people, but mechanically & narratively I didn't feel like it was doing enough to hold me through like 20 hours of "warming up for the good part".

Feels like a set of ideas being tested more than a finished & cohesive game, in part due to every map using the same 3-5 textures and in part due to the really broad collection of gameplay mechanics. You have a set of stuff hinting towards tactical FPS gameplay like aiming down sights, gun jamming and bullet arcs, alongside some movement mechanics that mostly end up letting you sequence break or outright skip levels, and then a hunger meter which seems to be there mostly for vibes.

To be clear, I do enjoy the really wide net of mechanics, and the gunplay feels great once you get used to it, it's just that a lot of it feels extraneous to the challenges provided by the level design - at least on normal difficulty, you could probably just play it like unmodded Doom and be more or less fine. I'm hoping the followup, Beyond Citadel, ends up feeling more cohesive in that regard.

Excellent arsenal where everything feels more-or-less consistently useful (if sometimes situational), a pretty fantastic aesthetic (love the colour scheme in particular, something Bitmap Brothers about all the bronze-browns and muted greens and reds) and a really endearing attention to detail are the strongest parts of this game. I'm really torn on the level design (and partially the enemy design, in tandem) though, so I didn't enjoy the whole game as much as I wanted to.

The bullet-sponge axe zombies are there to keep you moving, and the cultists, with their ability to chunk you for like a quarter+ of your health, are there to get you to stop, which is a really solid push-and-pull to base the game around. Both of these enemies also behave in a surprisingly dynamic way, sometimes choosing to wander around and surprise you from unexpected angles instead of running in a direct line into your face. Unfortunately, partway into Episode 2 they start forgetting the pull part of the push-and-pull, replacing a lot of the cultists with either easy-to-kite projectile guys or other enemies that are generally way more up the "bullet sponge" ladder and way down the "actual threat worth spending bullets on" ladder.

With the risk of instantly dying the moment you round a corner gone, a lot of the levels just boil down to sprinting around and using the completely busted Jump Boots to skip entire sections of levels, which isn't a bad thing but it's also not the thing you expect after Episode 1, so it's kind of a let-down. The other levels tend towards pretzeling back and forth through an area to find like 3-5 different keys or switches, which was more hit than miss for me, though there are a couple of really roundabout maps out there.

The expansion packs both have really circuitous maps that frequently depend on really goofy pixel hunting, but they're good examples of two potential approaches to combat (Cryptic Passage largely focuses on the zombie-and-cultist combo, while Post Mortem mixes more than three enemy types into most fights, which is weirdly something that barely happens in the base game).

As just a raw toolset for custom maps, I'd bump Blood up by a full star, and I'm excited to dig in to some of those map packs in the future. The base campaigns don't really live up to that potential consistently enough for it to feel like an unequivocally 'good' experience for me, though.