Blood Shore is the latest offering from Wales interactive who have quite a back catalog of hit and miss releases. Late Shift and Maid of Sker being the standouts.
Blood Shore falls firmly into the "miss" category, but not before taking you on a whistle stop tour of mostly negative emotions.
The general premise is lazy and contrived. An FMV based Battle Royale on an island with a selection of generic character tropes.
You take on the role of a once famous American actor who hasn't worked in some time and who also has a mysterious hidden agenda on the island. As with all Battle Royale, survival it's the goal. Watch the movie play out and make some decisions against a timer at certain intervals
It's hard to tell if Blood Shore is taking itself seriously, or making tongue in cheek social commentary on the state of current media trends and socioanthropological attitudes. Even now I'm still unsure
The entire package is so patchy in terms of quality. The production value fluctuates wildly from some genuinely good cinematography and truly awful, almost stock, video titles for TV show and News segments.
The acting too is equally disparate. Some are capable actors playing their roles to believable effect; while others seem like cheap 'just out of acting school' over the top, awkward, "notice me" style desperados.
Given that some of the characters within the game are very much supposed to be like this, it becomes an ironic ouroboros of life, imitating art, imitating life.
The whole "movie" has the feel of 80s Dr. Who production and props, populated by low budget children's TV drama actors.
It feels inconsistent, awkward and genuinely difficult to watch.
I could possibly see this appealingly, at least initially, to a room full of drunks looking for something to chat around. Or possibly to game streamers looking for lazy content (there's that ouroboros again!)
Blood Shore is either, at its best, a genius work of art that pokes at the holes omnipresent in our social construct, folding layers of satire over each other and including developers, actors and players in a sandwich of commentary that invites you to ask some very difficult questions. Or, at it's worst, it's a poorly produced piece of detritus and lazy cash grab.
Either way it's probably not something many gamers would want to part with cash over.
Wait for a deep discount if you're looking for some soul searching or a drunken laugh.
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