Most retro-inspired shooters (or “boomer shooters”) are enjoyable. It doesn’t take a lot to make them satisfying. The important aspects are abstract things like kinesthetics; how it looks, feels, and sounds while playing.
The other crucial pillar of the gameplay is map design. If you get these parts right, it can be expected that it will do the heavy lifting to elevate even a subpar shooter, and most of the time, even the average indie developer does get it right.
It takes a special talent to bungle almost every facet of what makes a fun retro-style fps. Bloodhound manages to be uncompromisingly alienating due to its shocking incompetence and lack of polish. How did they do it and where does it all go wrong? Find out in our Bloodhound review!
Bloodhound
Developer: Kruger & Flint Productions
Publisher: Kruger & Flint Productions
Platforms: Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 (reviewed)
Release Date: June 28, 2024
Price: $10.99
Bloodhound begins with a motion comic that introduces the protagonist, a demon hunter who commits several savage fatalities on the Goddamned bar patrons. He doesn’t say anything. He is a ruthless murder machine and this is all the set-up that Bloodhound has to offer before it sets the players loose to raise hell. This utterly spartan introduction is all you need to have an excuse to blast away hellspawn, but it is also the smartest that Bloodhound ever gets.
The first moment players take control, a horrifying tingle creeps up their spine like a tarantula. The mysterious stranger’s movement feels surprisingly floaty and has a dash that barely makes distance. Jumping has a low-gravity feel to it and the starter revolvers lack the appropriate punch to their muzzle blast. These sad and pathetic limp arms feel less like they’re firing bullets and more like they’re shooting air.
The first areas seem unusually tight for a shooter with frantic gameplay. Foes don’t react convincingly when they’re shot and when they die they either go into a canned animation or explode into a small squib blast, leaving nothing. Bloodhound will constantly hammer you with fodder to feed you as you hopelessly come to grips with unsatisfying combat and sloppy weapons.
Some of the weapons feel ok, like the Gatling gun or rockets, but the rest of the arsenal is questionable. The shotgun is too weak and has the most useless secondary fire ever, which also has the most embarrassing animation ever seen in a boomer shooter. The flamethrower/chainsaw combo is conceptually awesome, but it is too ineffective and slow to be reliable and runs out of ammo too quickly.
Collecting orbs fills your demon gauge and when it hits 100, the main character can activate his devil trigger which powers up his weapons and turns them red. It can take a while to fill it up in the hopes of making the weaker weapons more useful. What the developers should have done was allow gamers to activate it regardless if the meter is full or not.
Other power-ups can be used, like the temporary infinite ammo which is too rare, and the slow-mo which also does not show up often enough. On the other hand, health and armor pickups are everywhere and thanks to the small levels and tight corridors, you are never too far from stepping on some restoratives. Areas can be so confined that almost everywhere you go is a choke point where you can get swarmed.
Enemies can be varied in their designs, like the hooded KKK guys or the (censored) topless demon ladies and even some guys who are obvious Leatherface knock-offs. Some of the designs are kind of fun. The “Punk” boss is especially cool since he’s like Ghostrider with a chainsaw. Sadly, the AI frequently breaks. It isn’t too uncommon for enemies to give up and stand still during a battle. Sometimes they run up to you and then stop like they forgot what they were doing.
Bloodhound could make use of its roster of monsters, but instead, it chooses to constantly spam gamers with the small and annoying flying hell baby creature. These pests come in swarms and bosses will often have them infinitely spawn during a battle. They have a nasty habit of flying right above the player where they are almost impossible to notice.
The aforementioned censored topless demon ladies are especially disappointing. This is something on PlayStation versions, though I cannot confirm censorship for the Xbox counterparts. The effect is a cheesy-looking pixelation filter that covers the chest areas for all female monsters and even statues too. It is truly pathetic since this is the same platform that featured bare breasts in The Last of Us Part II.
Bloodhound is not only relentlessly subpar, it is also intensely buggy. The AI failures could be forgiven, but the crashes that force players to replay vast chunks of the game are cruel. Other times there are some bugs that happen that can soft lock players. One instance that I encountered was during the final boss who is already very difficult due to the infinitely spawning flying hell babies, but made worse when the battle became unwinnable.
With less than a fourth of a life bar left, the final boss seemingly vanished or clipped out of the area, leaving me confused and lost. The flying hell babies kept on spawning infinitely, but the final boss was nowhere to be seen or heard from again. With my victory unfairly stolen from me, and my 5-year-old son watching the entire battle, he turned to me and and beseeched me to uninstall Bloodhound.
This was the worst first-person shooter I have ever played. I never thought it was possible to botch such a simple formula, but Bloodhound showed me how it can be done. Everything about it feels amateurish and sloppy. Thankfully it is cheaply priced, but it still seems like a bad deal.
Bloodhound needs a lot of work for it to be salvaged. It needs a lot more variety in the music department since all battles have the same blaring metal music that gets old fast. There needs to be more to do in maps other than find the three colored keys linearly. Jumping has no purpose and the dash is too short, but that’s because the levels are too small.
Bloodhound is such a massive failure that it gets nothing right. Everything a gamer looks for in a shooter is bungled and it creates new issues with its staggeringly bad design choices. Compounded with the technical failings that make it almost unplayable, there isn’t anything worthwhile here at all.
Bloodhound was reviewed on a PlayStation 5 using a code provided by Kruger & Flint Productions. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Bloodhound is now available for PC (via Steam), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
