Climax Entertainment – the people behind the Playstation EyePet game – are making their Xbox Live Arcade debut during the Arcade NEXT promotion with Bloodforge, but can they hold their own against games like Fez and Trials Evolution?
Bloodforge puts you in control of the mad-at-the-world warrior Crom. Crom is a hunter who sets out to kill the demons that slayed his wife. Bloodforge starts out in an extremely Skyrim-esque hunting seen where you’re quickly taught what to do. You’ll do some fighting, watch some cut scenes, and learn the rest of the story. This is where you realize that Bloodforge is not the type of game it originally makes itself out to be. Where Bloodforge seems to be a fun game with a deep story, it’s really a fun game with a shallow, dudebro action style story. Crom seems insistent on yelling everything he says and that alone strips a lot from the game.
The graphics and presentation in Bloodforge are all displayed in a red and grey hue with very little color to the world, with the most color coming from the blood spurting out of decapitated enemies, because if there’s one thing Bloodforge doesn’t lack in, it’s blood.
Bloodforge is one of the hardest game’s I’ve ever played, and this is due to the incredibly hard to manage health system. Crom’s health is all based on health packs that can be found throughout the game. They’re extremely limited in how many you can find, and once you use them, they’re gone for good. This creates somewhat of a flawed system. You’ll continuously be thrown into near impossible bosses with one or two health packs in which you’ll use them all and then find out – hey there’s another boss after that. This will leave you fighting an even harder boss with barely any health. This all leads to hours of replaying the same scene with the same problems, and being very rage-inducing to say the least.
While its health system may fall short, the combat in Bloodforge is extremely amazing. You’ll man three powerful weapons in Bloodforge – a sword, a set of claws, and a hammer – all which you’ll use to deal heavy and powerful blows to the undead army that attacks you. The combat system in Bloodforge is extremely fluid and easy to maneuver and, except for a few camera glitches, is near perfect. While large multi-enemy fights are few and far between, when a large fight comes into view it’s an amazingly fun time – even if you are playing it over and over again because of the health problems.
The one area Bloodforge fell short on aside from game play was the most important – performance; While Bloodforge has a unique leader boards system called Blood Duels where you place challenges with friends on who can score higher on a level. Normally this feature would be great, an added factor to look forward to when going up against those impossible fights, sounds great, right? It would be if it ever worked. Blood Duels continually told me it was not activated when it was, and, after fiddling with the settings for quite a while it still never worked. If this wasn’t enough I frequently found areas where enemies would box me into corners where I couldn’t get out of even after activating rage – a mode where all attacks have a knockback and do four times the damage. This led to multiple failures after hours of attempts and was ultimately one of the biggest flaws the game had.
The one biggest problem with Bloodforge, though, was that the game kept freezing. At least half of the times I died or had to reload a checkpoint the game would flash up a loading screen then lock up my console completely.
When all is said and done, Bloodforge has the potential to be an amazing game, but it needs to get its stuff straight. Much of this game seemed copy and paste and the glitches were just too much to handle. While normally Microsoft’s Arcade programs are filled with amazing games, Bloodforge simply missed the mark. Climax: release a title update and fix your game’s biggest features, then we’ll talk about this being a great game. Until that, I can’t recommend anyone buy Bloodforge, especially not for $15.
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I agree with every word
Excellent review. Yeah, when it starts out it seems like it would be great, good to know that’s not that case. Saved some money.