Blood is infamous for its difficulty which will reward memorisation of stage layouts and enemy placements. That's to its detriment for the most part because it draws difficulty mostly from cheap traps and deadly accurate hits can enemies, and really destroys the pacing of the first play through. Expect to claw your way into this game by save scumming. I say for the most part because the high difficulty makes repeat play more engaging than it would otherwise be. However, Blood is hardly lacking in reasons to replay. Weapons are varied and satisfying to use, very powerful, and unique amongst FPS games. Enemies have similarly hilarious grunts to Duke Nukem 3D, and sprites animate their demises satisfyingly too. Movement is fairly fast as you might expect from its pedigree, allowing one to re-enact their favourite John Woo action scene within constraints. The music compose for this game is good, but not plentiful enough for the number of levels, so it gets repetitive during the campaign. Also play with the midi soundtrack instead of the CD one.
I believe that I could describe how this game is in just the right way, leaving out enough info that anyone would infer I had been playing Metroid Prime. Thrown into a dangerous alien world, you are alone human, surrounded by alien species with mutually antagonistic relationships, which do not speak your language. You have a universal translator... for writing. Environmental clues and written notes will reveal the story of this planet. And reveal them you shall, unless you don't feel like knowing how to progress. This game was the next step in the path of evolution its contemporaries followed. Environmental narrative and interactivity, state of the art graphics, chunky guns of glorious low poly 3D. This looks really good in comparison to most out of 1998 (including Half Life and Quake 2). This game starts you off in medium difficulty, and that is difficulty level 2 out of 6. The enemies are just spongy enough that you won't be able to beat this game by trying kill everything as quickly as possible, without learning to dodge its attacks. Movement patterns for enemies in this game many times resemble that of multiplayer bots, or low level players in competitive online shooters such as Quake. Combine that with the relative lack of hitscan weapons, and you'll have to play well to defeat your enemies. It's a fairly challenging game for unskilled players like myself. The expansion pack Return to Na Pali is in most parts the same as the main campaign, but it mostly introduces worse elements like: human enemies with hitscan weapons and cheap looking movement (that barely flinch when shot in the face), hitscan weapons in general, and enemies that become invincible for long periods, and bugs. While not having any problems on the main game, I was only able to complete Return by no clipping through doors that wouldn't open, and had to restart sections a few times till the proper things would spawn. Main game: 4 stars. Expansion pack: 2 stars.
This game runs at an unbelievably choppy frame rate in my Windows 10 machine. Some people have stated that the emulation is just reproducing the slow down present in the originals, but that is surely not true. No arcade nor old console port of this game runs this poorly. Do not buy as no one will find this enjoyable. Hopefully you can buy the PSX, Saturn or Neo Geo CD ports of this game.
