Blood 2: The Blood Group

It's a shame that there's no part 1 of this game. Superior to the successor in every aspect. Darn shame.. Also if You haven't play it - please don't rate it. Thaaaaanks ; ]

blood has the feel that current day shooters are still trying to nail down. excellant.

It was bad then, it's even worse now. Unpolished, ridiculous bullet spounge enemies, buggy, unfair difficulty spikes, crashes, unplayable in win8 & win10 (through D3D)... Avoid. A complete failure and an insult to the excellent Blood. They ditched everything good about the prequel and made a near future-cheap fps. Also the tech was not right for the moment, fancy lightning and particles, but very low poly models and too many squared rooms with almost no decoration props. This was also the first game were I spotted lazyness from the devs recycling levels over and over again. The Included add-on "Nightmare Levels" is even worse. It lasts for like over than a hour and is a crash fest when loading levels. If you want a decent game using the first-gen Lithtech, try Shogo. You will also need Win7 to run it propertly, but it's playable from beginning to end without tinkering and also has mechs.

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.