Blood 2: The Blood Group

Blood 2 is a mess. It really is. There's some fun in here, but it's buried beneath layers and layers of bad, uninspired design. Essentially take Shogo, sloppiness glitches and all, set it in a dark dreary world (with no options for adjusting brightness), add a ton more weapons of varying degrees of usefulness, and suck out all the quirky charm and endearing earnestness. That's basically Blood 2 in a nutshell. It's not impossible to get enjoyment out of the game, but it's unlikely that anyone but the most diehard Blood/Monolith fans will be willing to put in the necessary work. The basic combat of Blood 2 isn't too awful, but it has many of the same issues that Shogo struggled with. Although you can take more hits than in that game, enemies will still immediately unload on you as you round corners or open doors, with nearly unerring accuracy. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the game's placement of health is atrocious. If this were Doom, and the amount of damage you took was directly related to your skill, it wouldn't be a huge problem. But considering that it's nearly impossible NOT to lose a certain amount of health when facing armed opponents, Blood 2's lack of healthpacks is a pretty frustrating issue. Worse yet, the firefights in Blood 2 don't even feel very good. They're incredibly simplistic, and lack any sense of weight or kinetic impact. Their simplicity could have given the game a sort of base-level "dumb fun" appeal, but the previously-mentioned issues keep it from being anything but a drag. It's hard to believe that these are the same people who went on to craft the brutal, dynamic firefights of FEAR. The one high point of the gameplay is the number of over-the-top weapons you get to play around with, which range from simple pistols and machineguns to voodoo dolls and occult staffs. Not all the weapons are as useful as others (in fact many are pretty much useless), but it's nice that there are so many to play with. The graphics of Blood 2 aren't quite as bad as those in Shogo. Nothing magnificent, but the art style is passable and the Lithtech engine looks about as good as other engines of the time. The only major complaint I have about the visuals is that you can't adjust the brightness level of the game. That's right... a game set primarily in dark dismal locales that doesn't let you adjust the brightness level. As you might expect, this means that you either have to deal with frequent pitch black areas or adjust your monitor settings every time you play the game. Even for 1998, this is unacceptable. Just about every other aspect of the game is fairly unremarkable. The story isn't anything special, the controls are passable but not noticeably good, the levels are as confusing as you'd expect from a late 90s FPS, and the sound effects (with the exception of some of Caleb's one-liners) are cookie-cutter. In fact, "cookie cutter" describes Blood 2 as a whole very well. The only things about it that stand out are the flaws. There is literally nothing here that hasn't been done better in another FPS (not the least being the original Blood). My suggestion would be to pick this one up only if you're completely out of other games to play, and just figure on using cheats and playing around with the weapons for awhile (and bind "taunt" to a handy button so you can hear Caleb's one-liners).

Blood has all the makings of the next big franchise: Great weapons, set pieces, well designed levels, a fun protagonist and managed to forge its own identity in a sea of similar games. Blood II took everything that made Blood so memorable and did the opposite. It's about as generic and forgettable as a game can be.

Read the rest of the reviews - this game doesn't work on modern computers. Wasted about an hour trying every solution posted in every forum I could find, nothing worked. Don't buy this broken game.

You also forgot the fact that Monolith sold the rights for the game to Atari who aren't going to have anything else to do with it, so there will be no Blood 3 either way, although they did announce some of the content they would've put in there and why do you care about the story? The story for Blood is unintelligible, stupid and pointless, just run around and shoot stuff in the face.

Nothing beats the cultists screams while being fragged by bouncing napalm wads. Play on max difficult, save often, have fun. This is a must play at least once a year.