Blood Omen does not live up to its reputation as a 'classic' or a 'masterpiece'. It is ugly, broken, frustrating, and actively tries to hinder your enjoyment at every step. You could call this game an A Link to the Past clone, but this would be doing A Link to the Past a *major* disservice -- Blood Omen is inferior in every single way. Most of the time, you and your enemy just sort of stand in place and swing at each other without any clear indication as to why your attacks land and theirs pass right through you, which feels like some kind of bizarre, broken interpretation of Diablo combat. Enemies have a tendency to either stand in place and swing blindly at you even though you are well outside of their attack range or land a wombo combo of 2-3 knockbacks that wipes out half of your health bar. The game hands out an item that heals you and revives you on the spot when you die like candy. Imagine if you could carry 99 fairies in a bottle in A Link to the Past. It's almost impossible to lose. On top of that, after the first dungeon, you get a spell (repel) that *literally makes you invincible*. If your combat *is so bad* that you have to give the player the ability to become invincible to make it tolerable, *you might as well have just removed combat entirely*. Since 90% of the game is designed around the existence of repel, almost all of the dungeons are obviously impossible (or at least simply not fun) to get through without it. However, since you arrive at most dungeons having used up all of your magic on casting repel to button mash through hordes of mindless enemies on the way there, you're forced to just put the controller down for 5 minutes and wait for your magic to recharge enough to cast repel. Some dungeons have zero magic restoration pickups, so you'll be doing this through *the entire dungeon*. Please, do yourself a favour and skip to Soul Reaver. It's not worth it.
An incredibly tedious and frustrating game. Incredible action -- better than its predecessor, faster paced, more responsive, with better guns. Despite being a loot-shooter, it correctly chooses to limit the number of guns in the game to a select uniquely designed ones, striking a smart balance between its roots and something closer to Borderlands. Unfortunately, those Borderlands influences seep into the core of the game design. You'll spend 30 minutes sorting through the worthless upgrade trinkets the game constantly throws at you only for 10 minutes of action, followed by another 30 minutes sorting through trinkets. I could not stomach this loop enough to see through the entire game. Replay Shadow Warrior 2013. Don't bother with this game.
