BloodHound – Review

Everyone likes some mindless skilling with a retro-fps, but will Bloodhounds promise of retro action and metal music hit the spot or miss the target.
When I first jumped in to the world of Bloodhound, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, there’s a clear influence from titles like the original Doom as you’re tasked with taking down the cult of Asteroth.

Unfortunately, aside from a few early comic-like cut-scenes, there’s little information on the cult of Asteroth, why you’re ripping them to shreds or how they keep appearing behind you every time you collect a key, but throughout the relatively short 2-3 hour “story” you’ll meet plenty of them, shoot them, walk around a little to find more and then collect a key which will spawn more enemies before you head through the door to rinse and repeat the same again.

Thankfully there’s a variety of weapons to arm yourself with, from your standard pistol and my favourite the shotgun, to heavy chainsaws with a flame-thrower option and dual-wielding mini-guns but sadly, most feel like pea-shooters and water pistols, void of any real feeling of power.

There’s plenty to shoot at though, with enemies often appearing in large groups from various angles to keep you on your toes and moving fast, but once again with any positive there’s a negative dragging it back down and due to some pretty poor AI, enemies are either incredibly predictable or just plain stupid as side-stepping or simply walking backwards is usually more than enough to avoid any damage, especially on the easier difficulties.

Travelling through hell on earth, aside from the demonesses who are intentionally topless for some easy headlines, but covered with a pixellated censorship because they obviously couldn’t take too many risks, you’ll find most levels looking fairly familiar, grungy basements, cave-like hallways and open structures don’t do much to ignite the imagination, but the overall level design is much more positive with those enemy swarms fluctuating between dark corridors and open arena-like area. It plays well to the retro-shooter genre, without treading any new ground.

Graphically there’s really not much to shout about, except for the retro-filter hidden away in the extra’s menu which adds a vintage filter making things look a little more nostalgic.
The “modern” graphics are terrible, but there’s nothing to make the game stand out, so I found grabbing the nostalgic vibe from the filter was at least a positive.

Audio is, as you might expect, a completely mixed bag, there’s no oomph to make those weapons feel like they’re packing a punch, but there’s enough ambience and enemy sounds to let you know when danger is near, sadly that metal soundtrack is a disappointing generic mish-mash of a repeating loop which soon gets tiresome.

Moving on to Value and on Xbox Bloodhound comes in at a reasonable £7, however on PC (Steam) it’s listed at £10.99, at over £10 it’s incredibly hard to recommend, but at £7, it just about scrapes through as decent value for a retro shooter.
You’ll struggle to get more than 3 hours gameplay, and I struggled to enjoy the last hour, but there’s definitely a couple of hours of mindless shooting for retro fans, just head in expecting as many negatives to balance out those good points.

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