I saw a cheap price for Blood II and thought I might as well buy, since it was one of those games from my teenage years that stuck in my head. I didn't manage to get through the replay however and I'm now wishing I had just watched a walkthrough on Youtube. There is just nothing to DO in Blood II. The first Blood, while still basically a shoot-em-up has a narrative and is simply structured - You have to rescue your three fellow cult members from three bosses and then proceed to kill the big boss and there are very minor switch based puzzles in each level (but mostly it's about the killing). Just off the top of my head though, I can vividly list the types of levels you play through in Blood 1, each distinct with fun identities; a moving train, a funfair, a snowy landscape with hotel, a spider's lair, a hellscape... Blood II has none of this. It is an exceptionally ugly game mostly set in a very basic, grey dystopian city and it just feels like no imagination went into elevating it from it's basic starting point. All you have to do is kill everything in your path and find a way out of the level, usually by blowing a whole in some wall. The monsters are also mindlessly repetitive and the AI (even for the time) is a little embarrassing. It just feels like it was all very rushed. Definitely not worth the revisit for me. It did however, work fine on my Windows 10. It is buggy in the sense that enemies spawn too late on occasion and their bodies remain floating in the air, but it did run ok with fine graphics.
I was lucky enough to encounter LBA2 as a kid, before I ever tried its predecessor. LBA2 is a flawless game - Absolutely one of my Top 3 adventure games of all time - It is a beautifully crafted world with a great story and well laid puzzles. I can not speak highly enough of it. Little Big Adventure (1) is just odd. All the same aesthetics and features are there, the same charming world, but it is just so utterly frustrating to play. Besides the excruciatingly irritating save feature (or lack of) there are just so many weird design choices which seem hell bent on punishing the player. Who ever heard of a game where you can die by running into a wall too many times (a flaw that is noticeably missing from the superior sequel), or in which being cornered by an gun toting enemy means certain death. There are moments in gameplay, when it is simply impossible to get away from the relentless gun fire and so much life is lost for such small encounters with bad guys. I WANT to love this game as much as I truly adore LBA2, but it doesn't seem to want to be loved. When I try to play it, I am always reminded that the balance here is off. The joy of playing is always outweighed by the frustration. I think I said it best before.. This game punishes the player. Skip this, buy the sequel.
