I’ve never seen a game lay down all of its cards faster than Bloodhound. It made my head spin, to tell you the truth. I felt like I’d just pressed play and I was being handed dual sawn-off shotguns. I suppose I shouldn’t complain about that, but it’s a symptom of a big problem that plagues Bloodhound: the pacing just isn’t there. It’s so excited to get this over with that it just dumps all of its content in the middle of the room and rolls the credits the moment it runs out of ideas.
I feel like we’re coming to the end of the ‘Boomer Shooter‘ wave these days. Bloodhound may have gotten a more favourable showing had it come out last year. There is creativity on display here, after all, particularly when it comes to the monsters. Unfortunately, it suffers a lot in the moment-to-moment gameplay. It’s difficult to pin down, but in games like these, it’s all about how the guns feel. If your shotgun doesn’t feel and sound like you’ve just unleashed a teeny-tiny nuclear bomb, then it isn’t getting a pass.
Raising Hell
Boomer shooters aren’t known for beating around the bush. They’re meant to resemble games like Doom after all. Not much plot there. Bloodhound opens with some comic panels, featuring some motorcycle man shooting up a bunch of people. Are we him? Probably. Who cares. Importantly, we’re then handed a revolver and told to mow down hordes of demons. That’s more like it. From there, we roll over a couple of bosses in pursuit of the big leader, Astaroth.
First (and second to be honest) impressions were rather mixed. Let’s start with the good bits. I like the different variety of demons on display. We’ve got faceless blokes with sickles and hooded cultists with machine guns, for starters. We quickly move on to demonic cupids, naked demon ladies with swords and one weird monster with a clown face that keeps turning into a naked woman. Fun times. There’s a decent spread of weapons too, covering everything from bullets, to rockets, to big, glowing energy balls. You can go akimbo with most of the guns too. I will always celebrate akimbo.
Bloodhound‘s big problem is that it really doesn’t know how to pace itself. There’s a few different pieces of evidence for this. First, let me lay out the general progression in these sorts of shooters. You start off with a pea-shooter, but this is compensated by weak enemies. After a few rounds of that, it’ll bring in a stronger enemy. To make up for that, you get a stronger weapon and so on until you’re fighting collossal enemies with a mega-rocket launcher. Bloodhound doesn’t follow that formula.
Slow Down A Bit
Instead, Bloodhound handed me twin shotguns about twenty-five minutes into things. At that point, they could kill most enemies in one hit. Its spread even stopped the flying enemies, snapping what challenge was left over its knee. When it brought in the glowing ball gun, it was all over. That thing could kill every non-boss enemy in one hit and recharged ammo by itself. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, but the BFG should not recharge. That just renders every gun – and enemy – pointless. This bizarre gun-to-enemy pacing meant I breezed through things. Bloodhound would introduce a new enemy, then BAM. A shotgun shell later and it’s gone.
What’s more, while the guns have a lot of potential, they don’t feel that great to use. Part of that might be the strange screen wobble when firing, but a lot of it is down to sound and enemy reaction. The sound design isn’t the best. The shotgun sounds like me coughing and there’s little indication of damage, until someone cues in the enemy death animation. When I blast a shotgun at someone, I want them to recoil – not just grin at me and keep throwing fireballs.
That said, I do like the death animations. Each enemy has a unique one, like the hooded lads that fire off their gun as they die. But to get back on the complain train, I feel like Bloodhound misses one of the central points of boomer shooters: exploration. There are secrets, but these are easily found. Instead, Bloodhound consists of a sequence of arenas, where enemies spawn in waves, and a few coloured key doors to seperate them. Everything ends up feeling very claustrophobic.
Bloodhound – Short But Sour
I suspect some of my sour feelings are from the fact that Bloodhound only sticks around for about two-and-a-half hours. Quite short for £11. It was crying out for some sort of arena mode to pad things out, but sadly not. It’s a shame because there’s some nice design on play. Enemies are good and the music isn’t half bad. If it slowed things down a bit and stretched out its environments, it could be great. Well, that and tweaking the sound design a bit.
As it stands, Bloodhound is decidedly middle-of-the-road. Not offensively bad (outside of the price tag at least), but doesn’t do enough to stand out in a thoroughly saturated genre. Destined to fall down behind the sofa cushions. A shame, really. There is evidence of talent on display here and the hope is that the developers can take when they’ve learned and push things further in their next game. Sadly though, not even the promise of bare, demonic breasts can breathe life into Bloodhound.
