Sometimes I find myself drawn to the more straightforward, simpler games of the past, and rarely does a genre provide the most primitive pleasure as old first-person shooters, especially those that are commonly called 2.5D shooters. And even though I’m usually drawn to something more familiar, causing outbursts of nostalgia, sometimes even in a long-familiar genre I want to feel some newness. In the end, not every time when I have the urge to go back to the old fools, I should return to the first one Doom , there are other games too.
About the game
And this time my attention fell on a game like Blood , created, in the future, by a famous studio Monolith Productions, and published GT Interactive at the very end of spring 1997, which some fans of the genre called Blood: Spill Some And Blood 3D, although for some the game remained a game about the leader of the world proletariat.
In general, for me, build games, that is, games created on the Build engine, remained somewhere at the intersection of vague curiosity and fading interest. All these Duke Nukem 3D And Shadow Warrior not to mention more specific things like Redneck Rampage just passed me by. Because when I had my first computer, it groaned with effort just by looking at build games. And so I limited myself to the maximum Doom II . And when I got my second computer, along with it came completely different games like the first ones Half-Life , Red Faction or Delta Force: Land Warrior . Build games seemed like hoary old times to me back then. Such things.
What made it interesting was that the game Blood turned out to be not at all what I expected from her. First of all, I was expecting a regular old shooter with a reactive pace of gameplay, labyrinthine levels, stupid and evil enemies, as well as a rather abstract environment and a lack of plot. But in the end I got a game that felt surprisingly fresh, standing closer to its comrades from a later gaming era.
Opponents
The pace of the game turned out to be much more measured than I expected. I’ll try to be more specific. All enemies can be divided into three large categories: annoying little things, monsters and people. Annoying little things in the form of all kinds of rats, spiders and running hands, which are one big reference to the Addams family and the Evil Dead (you have to get used to the references – there is a cart and a small cart in the game), causes irritation. Because it really can’t do any harm, but at the same time, due to the peculiarities of the engine, it is destroyed in a rather hysterical and chaotic manner. Of course, a hand can grab you by the throat (which is easily counteracted by the spam of the “use” button), and the game camera starts to jack from spider bites, but the damage from them is small, rather a banal inconvenience. Monsters are a different matter – they are quite fat, capable of destroying your health if you allow them to pin you down, but they are capable of causing damage exclusively in close combat or with slow projectiles. With them comes the dance of death familiar from old shooters: a step to the right, a step to the left, and then they twirled in a round dance with jumps.
But the main danger in the game, surprisingly, is the most ordinary people – cultists and fanatics in brown and gray robes, armed with shotguns and gangster Thompson submachine guns. They are hit-scanning enemies, albeit frail, but capable of draining your life back to the grave in a matter of seconds, and therefore require a more methodical, careful and sometimes even tactical approach. Where there is room for sneaking up in a crouch and luring you into corridors and doorways, and throwing dynamite through corners. Moreover, at difficulty levels above the second they themselves do not shy away from using explosives.
Arsenal
As a result, when clearing the next level, you have to quickly prioritize and combine different play styles. Because of which you are constantly balancing between a leisurely and cautious approach, a high-speed waltz around opponents and from time to time you are faced with the chaos of action brought by the small ones. This is also facilitated by the local arsenal, which managed to quite surprise me. Okay, with pitchforks, which, despite their brutal appearance, are the last hope of a player with a shortage of ammunition. Or with the same double-barreled gun, from which for once you can shoot either from a single barrel or a doublet. Yes, even the same Thompson assault rifle with a local plasma thrower, despite its effectiveness, are fairly standard guns within the genre.
But then comes the meat of the weapons set. In place of the usual two-piece, instead of the expected pistol or revolver, there is a signal flare gun, capable of setting enemies on fire with its shells, and in an alternative mode, also capable of lighting up area targets. Isn’t that pretty bad for a trunk that is among the first to be found?. Next comes a whole scattering of various sticks of dynamite. Here there is the most ordinary bunch of dynamite, with a burning fuse, and dynamite with a remote fuse and a dynamite mine. In short, there are few games where the most ordinary grenades would be so popular. It is not for nothing that in a much later F.E.A.R. from the same developers was repeated, this gentleman’s set. But unlike the newer game, here you can carry literally dozens of explosives with you, thanks to which dynamite is quite used in some places as the main weapon, competing with the same shotgun and definitely more often than a machine gun. Using explosives in the game is incredibly simple, intuitive and fun.
Here the hero finds himself in the hands of an ordinary can of either hairspray or air freshener, but in combination with a lighter it turns into a real flamethrower. Moreover, you can set fire to the can itself and throw it like an incendiary bomb. Or a napal launcher, it would seem, combining a regular rocket launcher and a grenade launcher, but it deals damage not only with an explosion, but also with fire. Yes, the same staff with a skull, capable of shooting, using your health as ammunition, literally floods all opponents with waves of hellish flame. And if necessary it can be used as an automatic stationary turret. Among this arsenal, even something as exotic as a Voodoo doll is already perceived as an ordinary sniper rifle, the length of an arm capable of taking down enemies from any distance with spiritual damage.
Have you noticed what a huge number of weapons in our arsenal turn out to be tied to fire and explosions?. Doesn’t it seem like this somehow characterizes our protagonist?? By the way, regarding damage in the game, it is divided into three types: physical, fire and spiritual. Accordingly, you have three armor scales responsible for protecting your carcass. And opponents, in addition to the type of damage they inflict on you, have different resistance to one or another type of damage, which should also be kept in mind.
And to complete the story about the fighting in the game, it’s worth mentioning the selectable bonuses, which can greatly diversify the gameplay. And if simple bonuses in the form of invisibility, invulnerability and a reflective shield are clear and understandable in their essence. Then the double barrels turn the main character into a real death mill, grinding whole packs of enemies, bosses, even the local evil god.
And the combination of all these elements gives rise to an incredibly addictive combat cycle that does not get boring or boring throughout the entire game episode. You just move forward, eager to encounter the next crowd of enemies and destroy them as beautifully as possible. Why does all this feel, despite the archaic graphic design, surprisingly fresh, pleasant and even quite modern. It is not surprising that later the authors adopted a similar formula when developing F.E.A.R. .
Levels
So, where does all this fighting take place?? To be honest, when I started the game, I expected to encounter the usual abstract labyrinth-like levels for old jokers. Where only the name of the next location can help you understand what the next set of geometric shapes and pixelated hints of the environment is trying to symbolize. Even in some first System Shock , despite all the immersive attempts, the surrounding space only hinted at the functional role of the surrounding labyrinths.
Here I encountered mostly quite realistic levels, implemented within the framework of technological limitations. The train station looks like a train station, the funeral home with the surrounding cemetery looks like a believable enough location capable of fulfilling its role. The detail of the environment is especially striking: the lights turn on and off at the click of switches, many objects of the game world are, although sprite-based, but vulnerable to your shots and blows. At the same level with the fair, I was amazed that all the competitions and attractions there were working and useful, at that moment it really pleased me.
All levels that provide a normal human environment and functionality look and feel surprisingly realistic for such an ancient game. Damn it, but the levels with the train, the carnival, the maze of horrors, the shopping center, the damned hotel and the city blocks I can easily include in the golden fund of the best shooter levels from the 90s. Of course, as soon as the game goes beyond the boundaries of habitable space into Gothic castles, factories and hellish locations, the levels lose their down-to-earth charm and again turn into abstract labyrinths. But at the same time, the labyrinths are quite linear and easy to navigate. In all four episodes of the original game, I only turned to the walkthrough once to understand where I should go next, and this says a lot about the local level design.
Moreover, in the game, local secrets for the most part are hidden quite logically and more than once at the end of the level the statistics showed the maximum of collected secrets, although I did not specifically search for them during the process of clearing the level. Having completed a level, I often rushed into the maelstrom of sniffing all sorts of nooks and crannies in search of secrets and riddles, and not finding them, I checked the caches in the passages. And even though most of the game’s secrets are quite obvious and can be quickly found with simple care, some secrets are hidden in such a cunning way that their discoverers probably only looked for them using codes.
A couple of research consumables from Casushicasino.co.uk the inventory also help in exploring levels: a diving suit, which allows you to explore underwater depths without wasting air and health; and self-jumping boots that allow you to make really high somersaults. Moreover, since the boots can be turned on and off at the press of a button, without necessarily spending the 100 units allotted to us, once found, they will remain in the backpack until the end of the episode. Moreover, their functionality is not limited to high jumps – by activating the miracle boots in time, you can ignore damage from falls and feel real self-confidence in the process of local parkour. Thanks to these shoes, I literally went through a couple of levels backwards – they allow me to cut corners in places and go wherever I want. The only consumable whose usefulness I could not understand is the glasses of “animal vision” – just completely useless garbage, which, when activated, changes absolutely nothing. But a portable first aid kit is one of the arguments of the last chance in the most difficult situation. At the same time, it is also spent only in the amount that is needed in order to replenish health to the cherished hundred. The first aid kit can be especially useful when finding a seed of life to replenish missing health and fully realize the potential of the bonus, doubling the maximum level of life.
From a purely formal aspect of the issue, the levels are created quite compact and tightly packed. More than once or twice, the authors will allow you to open more and more new shortcuts to the middle, beginning, and end of the level, so that running for the first aid kit or cartridges left behind does not feel like a fierce backtracking. Moreover, all these features of constructing levels with secrets and shortcuts will play out especially strongly when replaying the game, especially on higher difficulties. And the difficulty levels, named after the level of meat doneness from “still kicking” to “crisp”, in this game can quickly show a self-confident player what he is worth. So, at the second difficulty level, I personally recommend the game for the first playthrough, if you don’t want to sweat and strain too much, because the first difficulty completely turns the game into a walking simulator with rare shootouts. On the third difficulty, the game provides a noticeable level of hardcore and a blow to the beginner’s ego. The fourth level of difficulty can only be recommended to experts and veterans of the game who have memorized all the secrets and locations of enemies. And the last difficulty is completely balanced by the authors exclusively for cooperative playthrough.
Oh, ahem-ahem, plot
And so I talked so much about the gameplay, but so far I have avoided the plot and the general mood of the game events. And I kept silent about all this for good reason, because the local plot does not particularly shine with its originality or cunning twists, and is revealed exclusively in a couple of paragraphs of the Readme file and several tiny videos. Once upon a time there was a shooter from Texas, Caleb, and he was such a frostbitten bastard and a talented shooter that I couldn’t even save him. One day he met a woman, Ophelia, next to her dead family, but she said that it was all her husband’s fault, who had betrayed the Cabal cult, and therefore let’s serve the cult together and glorify Chernobog.
So Caleb, together with his sweetheart, enters the Cabal, where cultists, in the name of their Chernobog, create all kinds of fierce game, bloody rituals, slaughtering victims with an industrial approach, and all for the sake of greater strength and power. Quickly, together with her and a couple of other dudes, Ishmael and Gabriel, she reaches the highest ranks of the Chosen Ones in the hierarchy of obscurantists. Moreover, Chernobog himself is one of those gods who joyfully gathers strength and sacrifices, and then easily destroys his own strongest Chosen simply for the sake of some cunning plan. And then Caleb rested for a while, somewhere around a couple of decades, and rose from the dead to avenge his death and the death of his beloved and his cult brothers, and ask Chernobog: “What the hell was that?”?». Moreover, the main character Caleb matches the cruel and bloodthirsty world, literally devours the hearts of killed enemies and fallen friends, laughs, causing another destruction and massacre, he doesn’t care about the whole world and people. Although this game is openly mocking and overloaded with references and aesthetics of bloody horror films and slashers from the VHS era, and not an attempt to deconstruct the entire genre.
In short, the game’s plot is not far from the precepts of Grandfather Carmack. What she can boast of is the personality of the antagonist, who, unlike all the Doomguys and silent physicists, does not mince words. Although, of course, most of his phrases are banal one-liners, quotes from "Evil Dead" and other horror films popular in those years. Sometimes Caleb starts humming strange verses and all this is performed in such a velvety voice that it’s downright surprising. So in the end, in the main characters we have a frostbitten psychopath, a cynical misanthrope – just the thing for ruff teenagers and young men, stuck between the masculine 80s and the edge 90s. When you simultaneously want to be a cool wit like Ash Williams and a tragic misunderstood badass like Draven. It’s even strange that Caleb ultimately did not become the idol of the schoolchildren of those years.
A few words about sound
What else can we talk about?? Music, the music in the game is good. Of course, literally two or three tunes can be considered memorable and interesting tracks from the entire set. But the remaining compositions are quite atmospheric ambients and tunes. And in combination with the sounds of shooting, explosions, roars of monsters and pseudo-Latin cries of cultists, the sound picture emerges quite diverse and immersive.
Total
So what can we say based on the results of the whole game?. Before us is a game that feels quite fresh in terms of gameplay and level design, but is firmly rooted in an archaic approach to history and characters. It’s a pleasure to play and I didn’t really want to interrupt the gaming session every time, but at the same time the game doesn’t plow deeply. Rather, it provides such honest, uncomplicated fun and entertainment. To reveal it in all its depth, you will need to dive straight into studying levels, timings, vulnerabilities and work out the tactics of each fight. But if you’re not particularly thirsty or sweaty, the game might just be a quick fix, a dose of old-era video game fast food. Ultimately the game is too satisfying to write off even today. Such things.
Episode by episode
A little about each episode:
Episode 1: The Way of All Flash. Since I had never dealt with games on Build before, I was on my guard and chose the second difficulty, and it turned out to be just right for an unfamiliar game. So far I’ve only gotten through the first episode, which, probably, like other episodic jokers from the 90s, was a freebie. And I will say that the game surprised me a little. It surprised me, first of all, with its pace, which turned out to be closer not to Idov’s games, but to more realistic jokesters from the 00s. Moreover, a significant part of the enemies are opponents with firearms and melee opponents, which provokes more careful gameplay with catching enemies at corners and cautiously peering around corners along the safest trajectories. Only by picking up another bonus like akimbo, invisibility, invulnerability or a reflective sphere does the game directly begin to drive us forward while you have a temporary advantage. It’s amazing that all the levels are extremely tightly packed and twisted into a tight ball, with the opening of more and more new sections. The secrets are quite obvious, and they are not difficult to find by carefully studying the levels, but some secrets are hidden so cleverly that they were probably looked for under cheats. Usually I passed the level, and then peeked in the secret compartment where the remaining caches were hidden. But it’s still quite fun to play. If the next episodes are not noticeably worse or more boring, then maybe I’ll even finish the game. Although, of course, the levels of the episode, about two thirds, just got better and better, and then at the end they slipped down to some identical castles and caves. Mouzon, again, is simply amazing in places, especially at the fair and in the temple of the cultists.
Episode 2: Even Death May Die and he turned out to be damn good. First of all, I was pleased that throughout the entire episode we move through winter locations – it directly awakens a certain New Year’s mood. Moreover, the cards are quite cool and interesting – each next card turns out to be better than the previous one. The episode goes on like this, through ships stuck in the ice, snow-covered sawmills, frozen garden labyrinths, to its peak, which it reaches in the damned hotel, which for a game made on an antediluvian engine in 97 was implemented surprisingly well. A massive level populated by tons of enemies, beautifully furnished with tons of caches and secret passages. One level like this is worth a lot. Unfortunately, after the hotel, the episode begins to decline, the same secret level is simply uninteresting and even attempts at platforming in the ice caves seem dubious, the haunted house tries to copy the hotel, but despite all its advantages it copes with arousing interest worse than the hotel, especially since it is somewhat confusing. The next level tries to make you love platforming in frozen caves again, but no – it’s just boring. The mines that follow are stupidly quite boring and unimpressive, especially since in one place I stupidly didn’t understand how to pass the level normally and if it weren’t for the boots I had stored, I would have simply been stuck. The bossfight in the finale is even more boring than the fight with the stone gargoyle – the spider can’t even shoot projectiles. But, despite the fact that the episode fizzles out at the end, overall I found it quite good. Moreover, either I’ve already gotten used to playing on Build, or the game has become simpler, but the places that cause people to burn to the chair have stupidly disappeared from it. So, if I have some free time, I’ll take up the game further.
Episode 3: A Farewell to Arms and this episode, as it were, is much weaker than the last two. It all starts out seemingly healthy, here are urban locations: blocks of high-rise buildings, banks, hospitals, city sewerage, production sites from a meat processing plant to a steel mill and a hydroelectric power station. All this sounds cool, but in fact, a good half of the episode’s levels are fucking gray labyrinths with strange things and confusing level design. A new enemy has appeared in the game – a hellhound, which literally causes burning of the butt, and in addition, a plasma gun immediately appeared, ideally mowing down annoying dogs. The space itself seems to have shrunk and many collisions with enemies take place in some narrow corridors and enclosed spaces, in addition, the authors began to place the enemies themselves in an extremely vile and insidious way. The confusion of some levels led to the fact that I went through some levels in reverse, trying to decipher what exactly the monolithic guys wanted from me. In one level I came across a rather difficult puzzle, where I spent five minutes trying to get three blue stripes – I come here to relax, not strain my brain. As a result, we had to figure out which lever is responsible for what and create an algorithm for solving the problem, which seriously slowed down the pace of the game. But that’s not all, to understand how to complete this damn level I had to look at the walkthrough: after all, several barrels at the bottom of a deep reservoir is a very non-obvious solution. But after the second episode, I was pleased with the local secret level, which provided a good release after the cramped urban and industrial levels of the entire episode. So, for once, the final boss presented at least some difficulty and, in general, fighting Cerberus was more interesting than circling around the Stone Gargoyle and the Mega-Paucan. As a result, the episode was a disappointment for me after the first two, but still there was much more good in it than infuriating. But it’s better for the game not to try such labyrinthine level design and aesthetics of sewer factories.
Episode 4: Dead Reckoning. And after passing the main emotion is quiet disappointment. For example, out of the entire episode I liked only one level in the shopping center and that secret one. A couple of more levels can be given a plus purely for effort, but even they didn’t particularly please me. The castle with the laboratory is simply tiny, in Crystal Lake the attempts to depict a wooded area looked simply ridiculous, and the level inside some creature is not able to realize its full potential. The rest of the episode is made up of some castles, lava lakes, ancient ruins, Satanist temples, heaps of identical gray corridors and several non-obvious solutions. How do you like, for example, a cunning move when the key for passing was hidden inside some peaceful poor fellow. And I didn’t give a damn about these guys the whole game. And in the end, I poked around the level for ten minutes, not knowing where to go, until, out of despair, I stabbed a peaceful panicker with a pitchfork, and the key turned out to be in him. I wonder why the authors didn’t decide to go further – if they hid the key in a bat, that would have been a masterstroke. In another place I had to twist like a snake just to get out of the water – the place was made so crooked. But bosses from the first two episodes began to appear in the game as just fat enemies. In the final clash with the local devil, we will have to withstand the boss fight of all the bosses of previous episodes, including the dangerous Cerberus, and roll across the floor some Satan, who is not able to withstand even one long burst of plasma gun. It feels like at the end of the game’s development the authors were stupidly exhausted and began to sculpt levels anyhow, just to finish it. Not only that, in the transitions between missions at least some logic that could be traced in previous episodes of the game has disappeared, but also stylistically the episode is completely screwed up. For example, it seemed to me that the secret levels from the third and fourth episodes were simply mixed up, because the supermarket was much more suitable for the urban third episode, just as the catacombs would have been better combined with the final episode. But maybe I’ll still check out a couple of official additional episodes, otherwise I don’t want to say goodbye to the game on a low note. Well, or I’ll go back to the first two episodes on a higher difficulty.
Blood: Cryptic Passage
Additions, additions are a very tricky business. Especially when it comes to additions to classic shooters from the 90s, because in those years the world of video game sales was sometimes wild and unintelligible. Then real sequels could come out, differing from the first parts by literally a couple of new enemies and one gun, and representing a pack of new levels. At the same time, completely different games were released under the same name on different gaming systems, sometimes differing in almost all. And for some games, completely amateur add-ons managed to come out, published by who knows who, but often approved by the original authors. Moreover, in those days, games were smaller, and their development did not require many hundreds of employees, an entire five-year plan and the budget of a small African country. Therefore, it is not surprising that after the release of the original game Blood from the studio Monolith at the end of May 1997, a month later at the end of June some Sunstorm Interactive created and WizardWorks Software published an addition called Cryptic Passage (which they originally wanted to call Passage to Transylvania, but apparently the authors didn’t want to hit it completely in the forehead).
So was there anything new in this soon-to-be-cooked addition?. Well, actually no: all the enemies, weapons, environments, sounds and music remained exactly the same as in the original game. They just throw a new campaign of ten whole levels in your face and that’s it. What else could you expect from such a precocious product?? Moreover, despite a number of frankly crude and unfinished decisions, the campaign itself turned out to be surprisingly solid and consistent, without slipping into some kind of trash talk and outright vassiness.
There should be silence in the library
All levels turn out to be united by one theme – classic gothic horror. And what – we travel to all sorts of Carpathian attractions: we ride on a steamship and boat along rivers and swamps, visit opera houses, monasteries and Gothic libraries, make our way through cemeteries to large mountain castles. It seems that somewhere in the neighborhood of Caleb, Jonathan Harker and Abraham VanHelsing are riding through the mountains and valleys, along with all the other victims of Ruritanian Gothic. Moreover, the levels are assembled quite competently and in some places even on a good scale. Is that in some places the authors went a little overboard with the tightly knit structure typical of the original with constant cuts, in favor of a more linear structure. But overall the levels are beautiful, in some places not inferior to the best levels of the original game. The same level on the ship clearly hints at the train-driven level from the original, and I liked the cursed monastery and the local level with mines more than their colleagues from the original game.
Music plays on the boat
You will be able to notice the phantasm?
The only place where it turns out that a lower level of skill is noticeable is in the authors’ irrepressible passion for respawning enemies. Still, in the original, the authors tried to disguise the respawn of enemies by transforming the environment, as a result of which it was always clear where the enemies came from in an already cleared location. Here, the authors sometimes manage to create whole heaps of enemies literally on your heels when you walk along an empty corridor, and within a second a monster that appears from the great void begins to gnaw on your sirloin. Well, level design sometimes fails in terms of the obviousness of progression through the level. On a couple of levels, I had to peek into the walkthroughs to understand where the authors managed to stick the key or lever necessary for further advancement. Plus, the authors of the add-on turned out to be not so inventive in terms of vertical level design. So you are given jumping boots only at the very last level, but you don’t really need them anywhere. Unless you jump from a couple of Cerberus who became the final bosses of the entire expansion.
You’ll kill me, boatman
By the way, only after completing it did I at least find out why Caleb needed all this. It turns out that after the murder of Chernobog, he made a visit to Ruritania for the sake of certain scrolls belonging to the Cabal cult, in order either to gain greater power himself, or to prevent the Cabal from gaining this power. The authors never came up with anything more. There weren’t even enough of them for full-fledged screensavers, instead they were given a slideshow with pictures and captions at the very end. Although they couldn’t even tie the death of the bosses to the level completion script. As a result, you still need to fiddle around in the arena for a couple of seconds, opening the door to the end point. It is in such things that the obvious dampness of the supplement is felt.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has not been met?
Freddy, what have you lost here??
And to summarize, this is simply a good campaign in an atmospheric setting, moderately complex, quite inventive, not offering any novelty, but also not causing unnecessary frustration. Compared to the last campaign of the original game, it looks really invigorating. So if you didn’t have enough gore after the original, then it wouldn’t be too much of a mistake to pick up this addition to the bloody game. Still, in its core it carries some interesting piece and can give a couple of hours of interesting pastime.
Blood: Plasma Pack
At the game Blood with the additions everything turned out a little strange. Otherwise, I can’t name a situation when an addition to a game, a month after its release, is not only created by a third-party company, but also published by completely different people, and with all this, the addition ends up with official status, is included in collections and is republished. With the next expansion pack, everything was much clearer, at first glance, at least. Blood: Plasma Pack, created by the original developers from Monolith Productions and published GT Interactive in mid-autumn 1997, almost five months after the original, fits much better into the usual industry picture. And for the most part it is a more complete addition to the original.
After all, it was developed by the authors of the original game, and they had much more time to provide players and fans of their game with new content, and not only in terms of another story episode. From their generosity, the developers added several new enemies in the episode included in the expansion pack Post Mortem. Plus, they rebalanced the player’s arsenal somewhat, making some changes to the shooting modes, but since these changes affected all the already released episodes of the game, I played through the entire game with them and therefore didn’t even bother to read what they changed there.
I couldn’t find the plot in the new episode either in the Readme file or in the game itself, where there are no new cutscenes. Here, even the previous addition from completely outsiders was much more verbose with their couple of pictures with captions. But if you believe the Internet, then Caleb went on a campaign in order to eliminate the new Chosen Ones, whom the Cabal cult began to train in return for Caleb and his friends cut down by Chernobog. But, of course, the plot was never particularly important in shooters of that era – everything was decided by the gameplay and levels.
And the gameplay in the new episode took the road of even more hardcore. If you decide that the difficulty level you have chosen to complete the main game is some kind of easy, then I advise you to first go through this episode on it, then you will get a feel for what awaits you when playing the old episodes on a higher difficulty. Probably, in all the previous episodes you will not have the opportunity to encounter such huge hordes of enemies in a wide variety of combinations. Moreover, somewhere from the middle of the episode the game will begin to stifle you with its sharply increased complexity, provoking you to an even more careful and tactical approach to clearing the next room or location.
New types of enemies will also contribute to the increased difficulty. Here you will find grenadier cultists literally throwing sticks of dynamite at the entire surrounding area, and cultists with adze guns in rubberized robes immune to electricity. Because of this, you will no longer be able to clear entire halls with one plasma thrower at the ready – you will definitely have to juggle barrels and not sit still. Once you break the mirror, miniature copies of Caleb himself will climb out of it, just like in "Army of Darkness". And plants that spit acid and fire will give you many “pleasant” moments. The same bosses of the first two episodes will appear as just fat enemies with enviable regularity. But with all this, the game manages not to cross a certain line and therefore can be completed literally in one sitting and brings a lot of joy when solving the next shooter problem. And the local bosses – those same new Chosen Ones – provide you with a much greater challenge than Chernobog himself. At first, it seems that these are just ordinary fat cultists, but after receiving enough damage, they turn into a demonic creature with impressive speed, AoE attacks and increased jumping ability. Finally, with which there are already attempts Blood smog in boss battle.
But if everything turned out to be good with the gameplay in the new campaign, then the levels themselves were somewhat let down. And if everything starts for health: supermarkets, halls of office buildings, warehouse complexes and an aqueduct with a small port; then further the levels slide down to completely featureless castles, temples, catacombs and dungeons, which with their monotony merge into some kind of uniform mess. At the same time, losing the signature coherence and logic of following locations throughout the entire episode, which the same authors of the previous add-on tried to maintain. Even the secret level was a let down, proving to be a disappointment not only in terms of overall design, but also in terms of gameplay challenge and difficulty.
And such inexpressiveness can be easily explained by the fact that the main efforts of the authors went into the first levels, and the other half was collected from the rejected remains of the alpha version of the game. And the local bosses turned out to be just one of the interpretations of the alpha mechanics. Apparently, while the main team was developing the studio’s next games using its own custom engine: the next part Blood And "The Furies of the Kronus Rebellion" , some narrow circle of developers were finishing up the content thrown out of the working versions of the game and trying to come up with at least something new for the amusement of the player and money for the publisher. Here we can only be glad that they managed to produce at least something good and enjoyable. Even the fact that the authors again hammered home the idea of tying the end of the episode to the death of the bosses, you are already more lenient.
And if we draw a general conclusion about this addition, then it turned out to be cheerful, tough, perky, in places setting everything on fire for the player. And at the same time, it brings quite a lot of novelty so as not to lose interest in the game already on the sixth episode in a row. And I don’t need more from such an expansion pack, assembled on my knees from recycled materials and with the help of my talent and such-and-such a mother.
Afterword
So what happened next with the first Blood ? As far as I heard, after the full collection was released in mid-summer 1998 One Unit: Whole Blood, the first part was forgotten for a long time by the copyright holders, remaining in a very poor technical condition, especially when playing on anything newer than machines of its age. Only through fan efforts as part of the same BuildGDX or NBlood interested newcomers could play the game. She returned in at least some official form only through the efforts of a retro publisher Night Dive Studios who released it under the title Blood: Fresh Supply . So now the game has become much more accessible to study by any interested neophyte than even ten to fifteen years ago. Therefore, I can only strongly recommend it for familiarization not only to all fans of antiquity, old-school shooters and retrogaming, but also to everyone looking for new, fresher gaming sensations, some new experience, which, upon closer examination, turns out to be far from being as mossy as it might seem. In the end, this game is just fun to play, and that’s the main thing.
P. S.: The game was played using a source port BuildGDX, because he suffers in attempts to get the game to work normally DosBox, I didn’t want any qualitative advantage from the re-release of the game called Blood: Fresh Supply I still haven’t found it with the source port. Setting up the game is simple and clear, the in-game settings are extensive, and tips for setting up, installing and launching the port appear in the very first links of a Yandex or Google search.