Mitsota's Awful Blood: One Unit Whole Blood Review
Blood is a first person shooter released on May 31 1997, one month after Redneck Rampage, and just before Shadow Warrior came out. The game runs on the Build engine, which was showing it's age even at the time; but I feel like Monolith went above and beyond my expectations with what they were working with.
The plot centers around Caleb, a vicious spree killer who's loose in 1800's America. He is recruited into a dark cult, where he quickly climbs the ranks of the evil god Tchernobog's army. A meeting is called by Tchernobog, and once Caleb and his companions gather, they are betrayed, one by one slaughtered by Tchernobog. Caleb is then banished, warped to a shallow grave at the back of an old tomb. Caleb crawls out of his grave, picks up a pitchfork, and begins slaughtering a trail back to Tchernogog's lair to find out why.
All good so far, pretty generic eldritch horror stuff. So how's the gameplay? Pretty damn good, actually. I forgot how smooth and quickly you can navigate the battlefield in Build engine games, and Blood is no exception. You can zip around the map at high speeds and parkour around by jumping off enemies and props to get to higher vantage points. However, I found that charging in, bouncing off the walls and blazing gunfire in the general direction of my enemies was a great way to get myself trapped in the corner of a room with 1 HP and no bullets to my name.
The most common enemy type are these gun toting cultists who pin you down with oppressive hitscan guns and bundles of dynamite. However, they're not that smart, and def to boot. Most of the time you can get away with bouncing a bundle of dynamite off a wall to kill them from around a corner, or simply peek out to make them follow you around the corner into a hail of gunfire. I also noticed that while they're pretty deadly with their explosives, they seem to have trouble aiming guns. a lot of damage can be avoided by sporadically crouching, and taking cover behind knee-high surfaces. Other enemy types include melee and projectile throwing zombies, gargoyles, hell hounds, fish monsters, rats, spiders, and half-naked dudes. The half-naked dudes are just there to murder for fun, they don't do anything.
Speaking of murder: The game offers us LOTS of fun ways to do it. Starting with the surprisingly effective pitchfork, great for killing enemies who have a melee animation. The flare gun, an effective fire weapon that 1-shots cultists. The sawed-off, a classic staple of the FPS. The tommy gun, very effective but chews up ammo quickly. rocket launchers and dynamite, both of which you must be *extremely* careful with. Voodoo dolls and staffs, also highly unstable but highly effective. A plasma cannon that you'll swear is the only way to kill some enemies. And lastly, the greatest weapon of all: a useless short range spray can.
In-between murder, finding bullets, and more murder, you'll be wandering around some pretty impressive maps, massive in scale, designed to funnel you towards your next objective, and sometimes even fairly nice looking. Naturally the best maps are front-loaded into the first episode, as this was a shareware title; but every map is competently made, and I only had to look up a walkthough for a single level in main game. That's pretty impressive, considering the game has 6 key slots.
Let's talk about the sound design for a minute. Most sound effects are great, with guns roaring loudly in battle, shell casings bouncing as they hit the floor, fuses hissing as they burn down, and enemies producing a satisfying "woosh" as they are lit on fire. My only complaint about the sound design is that most enemies make a grand total of 2 sounds: one they repeat over and over when they know where you are, and one for being in pain. This gets very repetitive and annoying, especially when fighting huge packs of enemies, but not every enemy does this. The cultists, for example, have a pool of about 12 phrases they shout at you and eachother, and they even vary in pitch! Apparently an entire language was developed for these cultists to speak, and according to the wiki on the game, it's a variation on French. How frivolous!
Before we wrap this review up, I wanted to bitch about the expansion packs for the game, included in the version I own. While I don't have any big complaints about the Plasma Pack, I feel like it was a great map pack with great new enemies; The expansion pack I really have gripes with is Cryptic Passage. Cryptic Passage is a 3rd party add-on pack that added a new episode and some multiplayer maps. While the level design in Cryptic Passage *looks* beautiful for the engine, the actual navigation of the levels is asinine; After wandering in circles for upwards of 40 minutes, I would break down and look up a walkthough, only to find that the solution was "hit this button at the base of the bookshelf to open a door for 3 seconds" or "jump in the water and look around for a small hole". I needed a walkthough for 4 out of 9 of the maps in this pack, it was obnoxious.
In conclusion, I think that Blood is an excellent game, even if it's bundled with a questionable episode. The Build engine is certainly rough around the edges, and I've since been spoiled by things like the ground not warping and distorting when I aim up and down; But Blood still held my attention for about 35 to 40 hours of playtime, and what modern shooter can you say you've sunk 40 hours into the story mode of?
You want a score? uh... 8 outa 10.
Blood: One Whole Unit is available on Steam and GoG.com, and the shareware episode is still widely available for download and can even be played in your browser for free.