Nostalgia Tripping: Blood

From time to time I get the urge to play games from my childhood and it's invariably an interesting experience, particularly when it's a game that I've always held in high regard.

Enter Blood, a dark and gory first-person shooter (FPS) developed by 3D Realms and Monolith Productions. Released in 1997 following in the footsteps of Duke Nukem 3D, Blood puts you in the shoes of Caleb, a Wild West gunslinger brought back from the dead to seek vengeance against the god Tchernobog, who killed Caleb many years ago. To achieve this, Caleb must battle through the hordes of occult enemies currently inhabiting the world he has woken up in.

Disco inferno

Now it's true to say that I never owned the game. Back in those days the shareware scene was still flying high and the shareware version of Blood contained the first of four episodes, which was more than enough to satisfy my younger self for a good deal of time. I do remember having a great deal of fun playing through it; certainly enough to play through the episode many times, so the question is, does it still stand up to the test of enjoyment after fifteen long years?

I want to cover the gameplay first. To start with anything else is always going to be unfair after so long. The basics of any FPS, 'move', 'aim', 'shoot' and 'use' are all there. The character movement is smooth and speedy - very speedy! Sprinting at 40 km/h was fairly standard at the time and it really is quite refreshing to be able to zoom around a level with wilful abandon without having to keep an eye on a stamina bar. Jumping and crouching are both in (the latter wasn't necessarily guaranteed in similar games at the time) and work well enough, though the jumping has a slightly unnatural feel about it. It's worth noting here that I was playing with the mouse and keyboard to make things as closely comparable to modern games as possible. I originally played with only the keyboard - goodness knows how!

Aiming at your targets is obviously a critical element of gameplay. This is one area where Blood falls down in front of over a decade of improvements (or indeed, just a year or two). In all honesty, I think the game was designed more with the keyboard only player in mind. The mouse controls are there, once you've worked out where the appropriate input settings are, but there's a slight lack of responsiveness and precise targeting is next to impossible. However, as was standard with keyboard-based shooters, auto-aim is built into the game, which covers for these problems most of the time.

Hey! Catch!

Shooting, well this is where things get really fun. The weapons available are diverse and were stylistically novel at the time. Many also have a secondary fire mode, a feature that was uncommon. When stepping out from your grave in the first moments of the game you are armed with only a rusty pitchfork to jab menacingly at your foes. Shortly after, you find the flare gun, an incendiary pistol which can set enemies ablaze, sending them running and screaming until they ultimately collapse into a smouldering pile on the ground. Did I mention that this game was rather violent? Well it certainly is, though it's more comical than cruel. Bundles for dynamite serve as grenades, there's a sawed-off shotgun and a Tommy gun. Less conventionally, there's also a voodoo doll, and aerosol can turned flame-thrower and a Tesla cannon, to name but a few. All are satisfying to use and the alternate fire modes really add a good deal of variety to the way in which you fight your enemies. There's even a power-up called Guns Akimbo which doubles up your one-handed weapons for a limited time.

Level structure is fairly standard - find a key, open a door, press a switch, with copious quantities of bloodshed in between. The settings are semi-realistic in that they feature locations such as a station, a carnival, a moving train and so on. There's a lot of variety in their design though, which keeps things fresh as you play through the game. The environments are reasonably interactive. Windows can be smashed, light switches switch lights on and off, certain special walls can be destroyed and a whole host of props can be splattered, disintegrated or otherwise obliterated. There are plenty of secret areas to be found too, with the most cleverly hidden giving the greatest rewards. Certain interactions cause Caleb to make an invariably dark or morose comment; a helpful reminder that you're not exactly playing a goody-goody world saving hero!

Hipster zombies: Living again before they were cool

Now onto the topic of visuals. Of course I can't easily appraise such an aged game by today's graphical standards so I'll judge it on its own merit whilst bearing in mind the time in which it was released. The game uses an enhanced version of the Build engine (see also Duke Nukem 3D), in particular the addition of voxel objects. It's not the 'true 3D' of Quake and Co., but it's flexible enough to present a convincing portrayal of the game world. It has a limited palette of 256 colours (not unusual back then) but it's used to good thematic effect. Admittedly there's a lot of brown and grey, but I feel it fits the tone of the game as a whole, so it's not something I consider to be detrimental. In fact I found it quite easy to get absorbed into the game world and my mind did a great job of suspending my disbelief. Perhaps that's due to growing up when these games were cutting edge. In any case, I think the creators of Blood made the most of the resources available and the game stands up well because of it.

Briefly touching on the audio side of things, the sound effects present are well suited and serve to enhance the cabalistic nature of the game. Robed and hooded monk-life enemies jabber with fanatical fervour, zombies moan and groan, rats squeak, stone doors scrape and grind, and the weapons sounds are pleasingly punchy. The music is serviceable, but it doesn't stand out in any memorable way.

So back to the original question - did I enjoy it? In short, yes I did. Despite some initial frustration with the mouse controls, I soon found myself running and gunning as if I was young all over again. What it boils down to is that Blood is satisfying to play. The assorted weapons are visceral and fun, the enemies each require different tactics to eliminate, the overall theme is appealing and consistent and there's very little that gets in the way of actually playing the game. And that's just the way I like it.