Bloodhunt is yet another free to play battle royale out today on PC and PS5.
After some time in early access on PC Sharkmob's F2P vampire battle royale gets a full release along with it's crossplay counterpart on PS5.
There is currently no Xbox or PS4 version available and owners of these consoles are probably the lucky ones.
It's honestly just more of the same old thing with a fresh lick of paint.
This time you take on the role of a vampire that is, for some reason, fighting lots of other vampires in the picturesque city of Prague.
You can select one of seven archetypes each with 2 unique powers and an "ultimate".
You then go head to head, or trio to trio , with up to 45 other players.
As you traverse the beautifully recreated old city you find armour and weapons conveniently scattered about, as well as a few regular people kicking around, just waiting to be eaten.
Use these to give you the advantage in eliminating the other players as a red mist converges making the already pretty small map ever smaller.....yawn.
This game makes zero sense. I'm sure there is a back story hastily written on a napkin somewhere to explain all this fucking nonsense, but it would be pure lip service.
Vampire the Masquerade was originally a pen and paper RPG from back in the early 90s, I know, I owned it.
It created a really fleshed out world with extensive and interesting lore. So much so that there was even a TV show called 'Kindred: The Embraced' created in '96 that became somewhat of a cult classic. Speaking of cult classics, there was also that rather popular Bloodlines game released in 2004. All of these contained fantastic storytelling in one way or another then Bloodhunt got shat out...
Bloodhunt is the equivalent of Matrix Ressurections. A incoherent pile of shite, tenously linked to previous releases by sharing it's name and created purely as a vessel to cash in and make some easy money.
Today's press releases even made a point of highlighting Bloodhunt's "rich lore" taken from Vampire: the Masquerade. The extent of which seems to be unconnected flavour text on loading screens such as "Brujah like to punch things".
I don't remember ever reading about a vampire convention in Prague, that got out of hand and ended in a mass brawl... but only in the old city tourist area. Vampires famously can't leave tourist areas lest they fall victim to the red mist!
I could probably excuse all that if the game were decent, but it's at best "fine".
The city is well realised and looks really nice, the framerates and optimisations seem on point.
Character models are samey and stiffly animated, essentially mannequins for kids to dress up in skins paid for withtheir parent's credit cards.
Mechanics are dull and bring nothing new to a stale genre.
Despite the city bringing a layered verticality to gameplay, it mainly fades into insignificance as 90% of all skirmishes seem to happen on the rooftops and only really come down to ground level if a player accidentally falls off.
What innovations Bloodhunt brings are gimmicky and pointless. For example, your dualsense lights change colour to indicate in game or proximity events.....who looks at their controller during a game??
Bloodhunt is simply another one of those fringe BR games that attract players at launch but then the playerbase drops as they filter back to Fortnite or wherever.
There's simply not enough to keep most players engaged and it does nothing different compared to other games that are already doing the same things bigger and better.
Bloodhunt is free so worth checking out to form your own opinions, but I wouldn't recommend dropping any real world cash on a game that most likely won't be around in a couple of years.
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