Is Bloodhound the new contender for being the retro FPS we have to look forward to playing?
Ongoing interest in retro FPS’ have grown so large that it is expected to see Doom or Quake-likes on the market every month. Some developers can drop a well-polished game with their own approach to the genre perfectly and gain popularity in the community by doing so. It is always expected to find some good contenders for the genre as retro FPS style is easy to work on and adds some neat twists too. Meanwhile, we can expect to find some underrated gems; sometimes the unexpected can happen out of nowhere. Such a case happened when we hyped for Bloodhound and got what we didn’t ask for.
The retro FPS genre can be considered its own subgenre now. Regular FPS games can add realism and in-depth story to keep the players in-tact with the title, but retro FPS, or what we like to call “boomer shooters” usually tend to focus on the simplicity of shooting baddies and caring about the realism and story, aspect later. One thing to note with retro FPS games is that you don’t usually want to deviate or overdo what is embedded in the genre; unfortunately, Bloodhound tried this method and couldn’t bring themselves to the big league in our opinion.
Now, before we start describing what’s bad or what’s good about Bloodhound, we like to give a disclaimer that this game includes some forms of nudity. Not to worry, if you are not interested in nudity or want them off from your screen, the developers were kind enough to give the option to toggle it off right in the main menu.
As we stated early on, vintage retro shooters usually do not care about the story that much. The story is given lightly during loading screens, little texts, or very short cutscenes. Sadly, in order to follow what is going on in Bloodhound, you either need to be an ancient Greek citizen or a Latin literature graduate. The reason being the story is given out as little pamphlets on the loading screens in Latin, and as you could guess, not many people know Latin. To sum it out shortly, here is a brief explanation of what exactly is going on in the universe of Bloodhound.
As a member of the Order of Keepers of the Gates, you have to keep track of the portals to hell because the Cult of Astharot is causing havoc in the areas of hell portals. Your mission is to you must defeat the cultists who are clearly not happy with your existence and your task to protect the games. Of course, this cleaning is made with weapons provided by you and scattered around the maps.
While Bloodhound aims to reminisce the old shooters right out of the gate, it gives wrong vibes on how terribly different it is compared to what it wants to be. Enemies, who tend to be very easy on first levels, are usually in multiple waves hurl at you while you are trying to grasp the controls. Not only that is the problem, the game itself keeps restricting the player to places during a fight, making the escape scenarios not viable. Sadly, the execution of fights, even small ones, always land on a flat surface due to how frequent and how limiting they are. Not to mention, the game always throws the same fights right after you finished one, making the progress feel like a chore.
The first level is easy to evaluate as the game starts from the bottom with a single knife and a revolver. If it was a gold standard in terms of FPS games, the revolver would be the only weapon you would rely on for some time before upgrading to a better weapon, such as a shotgun or an SMG. Bloodhound just throws this idea right out of the gate and gives you a shotgun around the corner, and two minutes later, you get a submachine gun. The level of progress is somewhat non-existent and, to a degree, a bit forgiving.
Every weapon comes with a secondary action to keep things interesting. The right mouse button on a revolver gives you a second revolver for a short period of time. It is a melee swing for a shotgun, grenade launcher mode for the rocket launcher, and so forth. Again, it sounds promising and adds flavor to a certain degree, but we never came across a time when we utilized extra ways of dealing with damage, as the primary fire was enough to take down enemies with ease.
Talking about enemies, there are quite hefty amounts of them and you are tasked to kill all of them in order to progress; not like we can miss a few, and at the end of the level, we’ll be greeted with an end-level screen with our results. So it’s best to hunt for all of them, regardless of the places you visit. The aforementioned nudity comes with enemies as they consist of hell-spawn babies with adult heads and devilish women with sexy outfits. If there needs to be credit given, it’s the design and distinctive creation of enemies, as it is important to identify which enemies you encounter during the combat and act accordingly.
Reverting back to weapons because it is very important to talk about how they are implemented. Even though all of them are designed to look mean and can cause serious damage, most of them feel like hitting a paper with your finger: It might look powerful, but in reality, the paper is something very easy to rip or destroy. So, most of the weapons do look imitating, but their feel heavily showcases how soulless they are. And on a high note, there was one simple notch I couldn’t help but notice.
There are double-barreled, sawn-off shotguns in the game, they are very distinct in design and at first, I didn’t think it was a shotgun. The surprise is that it has a special move with the right mouse button and it’s about releasing a chain that attaches to enemies and pulls them closer. For the uninitiated, it might sound very cool, but this was already in another popular retro-style FPS game called Doom Eternal. So a bit of plagiarism there, but nothing too much, still, it’s odd that they went with this choice instead of coming up with something more radical about the sawn-off shotgun.
To keep the aura of an old-FPS game, Bloodhound also employs powerups for players to use. There are only three of them, so let us talk about them briefly. First, powerup slows time for every enemy but the player is unaffected, so they can dish out huge damage without being bombarded with bullets and projectiles. The second powerup is a syringe that gives 300 health to the player, albeit temporarily. It lasts about 10 seconds, and when it is over, the health reverts back to 100.
It would have been certainly better and might even come as a clutch to use the syringe when there is no armor to grab. The last and final powerup is the golden bullet, which gives endless clips to the player for 20 seconds, so weapons like miniguns and rocket launchers are quite powerful with this powerup. Bloodhound does not have any secret areas, but the powerups are usually hidden in maps that you wouldn’t actually visit, so in reality, they act as little secrets, albeit without the label.
One other thing to focus on the Bloodhound is the boss fights that we can encounter during our gameplay sessions. Of course, there is a huge build-up before the bosses appear, but the lack of start/end level marks makes it a tad hard to expect an incoming boss. Bloodhound sadly does not have an actual end-level screen nor an indication that the player has passed to the next level successfully.
The only way to kind of guess we are on the next level is the change of scenery from, let’s say an industrial area to a broken bridge or a spike in difficulty. Bosses themselves usually only require good positioning and lots of shooting, but sometimes there are bosses who are completely defensive against all bullet types. The game doesn’t tell you this, but there are some environmental hazards that you must lure the boss into so you can do extra damage. It is usually not apparent in a few tries, but soon it clicks in your head on what there needs to be done.
There are some other nitpicks we had during our gameplay, such as UI being very hard to navigate, HUD being all over the place, glitches that make the game unplayable, unoptimized graphics, questionable level design, and so forth. The only enjoyable part I had was the fact that the code for the crossbow was a bit janky, and they employed the “pinning-the-enemy-to-the-wall” niche for the arrows the crossbow use. The problem was, no matter how the enemy is away from the wall, it would still get attached to the wall with a very slow projectile dragging the corpse to the wall. It created very funny scenery with ragdolls swinging around, making it very fun to watch.
Bloodhound just feels alright as an FPS but fails to deliver the actual feeling of old boomer shooters. Despite the lacking key elements, developers still deliver updates and quality-of-life changes to keep the tile fresh and enjoyable. It also helps them to understand what sort of expectations the player base has as well. This leads to shaping the boomer shooter everyone wants instead. If you are looking for a title that still has a nice feel and is a bit different from what you are used to seeing, Bloodhound might be one of them. Just to let you know, approach the game with a pinch of salt, as it might not turn out to be the definitive shooter you were expecting.
