March into Bad Games month: Blood Knights

I was tempted to type out 'bad games mouth' but I'm not sure that joke has any teeth. I totally forgot to game over march anyway, so this review is coming out in April and oh well.

I noticed, around the time I was finishing up Dungeon of the Endless, that I felt like I'd been very hard on the recent crop of games I've played. I've played through some really good games since the start of the year, and not really very many games I've taken seriously that were seriously bad. I mean Final Dusk was sort of alright, but nothing really to digest. FF8 is a weird affair, but it's an older game that feels sort of patched together to accomplish its goals. So I set out to play two games I was under the impression were bad.

I believe I got Blood Knights from bundle stars, who sell bundle which are ... Generally not as well priced as IndieGala or Groupees bundles, but do seem to often have somewhat higher profile games in them. I actually had, at best, little idea what Blood Knights was. I knew it was relatively poorly rated, and also knew it was sort of silly and SteamShots had done a review ages ago. I assumed it looked B-movie as fuck and good lord if you like b-movie cheese nonsense, this is actually a game for you.

Blood Knights is a basic behind the back, god of war slash darksiders slash zelda or whatever brawler where you play as a crusader trying to fight the bad vampires. At the start of the game you are bonded to a vampire, who wears very little in the way of clothing but does look like she could throw a punch at least. Apparently this is cast on you by a priest, who seems oddly nonchalant regarding making some sort of blood pact between the commander of his knights and creatures of the dark. Though to be honest she mostly looks "mean" not really much else.

If you're playing the game two player, you divide up the characters, but if you're playing by yourself you can swap between the two. More on this later.

For the first little while the game hints that your character is unnerved by the blood pact and the vampiress is really hostile to the whole thing, but she's self-serving at best so doesn't really mind killing her former comrades to survive. You sort of get the idea it's going to have tainted feedback or you're going to be made ill by it and then NOPE another vampiress vomits on you and then you're a vampire. I'm not kidding. The scene is totally your dude being like 'oh god some of it got in my mouth aaaaaahh'

And then your second in command kicks you off a cliff. This pretty much sets up how storytelling works in this game. Right off a cliff and into the loo.


Before any other comment or idea is made manifest let us be entirely forthright: Blood Knights is not a good game. It is missing so many levels of polish the game just feels like a B-movie or just a clunky beta test. Enemy AI is uniquely terrible, with enemies leashing, drowning or just goofing around. Cut scenes are weird, disjointed things that pop up and the voice acting is downright bizarre at points. It's not pants on head retarded or something, but it could have used another layer or three of polish.

However Blood Knights is, like I said, charming in a B movie sort of way. If you've ever watched mediocre 80s action films, and found them likeable, then Blood Knights isn't bad at presenting itself when you go in expecting something along those lines. The lead voice actors are having fun with their roles, and the way they sound like they're smiling plays off the awful performance most of the other actors give. The visuals aren't really bad at all, and I actually like the ridiculously cliche rugged brown hair manly man lead. He is so manly! As I said earlier, the vampiress, whose name utterly eludes me, is pretty enough but does look at least a little mean.

So you know, it's not that bad. There's a great little bit where you go into a bar, order a drink and the vampiress informs "Jeremy" that vampires can't get drunk anymore. He then asks how you could possibly call that living, and it's clear the VA is having fun with it.

Graphically, like I said, Blood Knights isn't "bad'. It's not good, and the locales are pretty generic, but the characters don't look off and things are pretty distinct. The animations, inversely, are generally pretty awful and cutscenes where you focus on the animations are a little bit jarring to look at. There's a couple really cool shots in the game, though, and I do like how the vampiress looks. Also the bit right at the start of the game where they show how the vampires blew up the moon?

That's pretty cool. It's too bad the game goes generic as it can right afterward, but still.... They blew up the moon! Actually, the game also has a boss character climb into her "exoskeleton" made of alchemically created demon parts. They don't do much with it, but it's a pretty cool bit of visual flair. So while the game is pretty generic, it does have little peeks of creativity here and there. I actually do like how the ruined castles and fallen pillars wilderness stuff looks, but the bizarre fixed camera doesn't do the game any favors.

Combat in Blood Knights is probably pretty different two player, but solo the swapping element is pretty cool and I find myself liking it when it's not being wonky. Which is, well, pretty often. You generally use Jeremy in the upfront fights, which is most of the game, then swap to ... saints, what is her name? Alysa, apparently. I think they've said it like three times in the game. Anyway, Jeremy is your two swording melee bastard and Alyssa is your (seriously, why) two crossbowing lady.

This isn't to say the combat is good, although it is a bit unique and a bit fun in parts. You have a long list of abilities, half of which I forget to use, and combat often ends up being a lot of dodging, using cooldowns and then draining blood to regain health when you can. You can kite with Alysa, who is not named Alyssa because reasons, though not every arena gives you the room to do this. Assuming you pay attention, combat is certainly not hard, but it's just difficult enough that I don't mind it. If you autopilot you'll flop over dead, since you're supposed to dodge and avoid, but no one is going to find it challenging. The blood draining mechanic is actually an oddly good one. It's your main, and at times only way to heal but you have to manage it carefully. You are rooted in place when using it, but time slows down, so there's some odd little nuances to it.

In a better game it would be a pretty cool mechanic. Here, though, it's still an oddly tactical set of choices, though admittedly it mostly is because enemies beat the snot out of you at times. You're able to dodge missile attacks, but they often shoot through each other and then as you're meleeing half your life vanishes in an instant.

The game sort of reminds me of playing through the first Witcher. Oh, it's definitely not even in the same league, but it has this weird euro-charm at points that gives me a familiar resonance. I'm not even sure the game is European, so don't hold me to that, but it is janky and weird. The story isn't all that bad, or good, it's just sort of generic. The last line of dialogue in the game is "What? Oh, whatever..."

The audio is nothing to write home about, but nothing too detrimental as long as you're expecting some b-movie action. Some of the voice acting is just plain atrocious, but it's so bad it is more funny than annoying. It has the feeling of dialogue that isn't directed or laid out properly, just actors blandly playing out lines without setting them up properly. I don't know a great deal about voice acting as a profession, but from what I've read productions tend to suffer if the actors can't play off each other.

Oh, and this game does the MOST B-movie thing of all, where it casts a minor character in two roles and he doesn't change up his voice at all. In this case it has the only merchant in the game re-cast as one of the main antagonists, so all you can hear is the (well voiced) trader trying to be threatening as a ... It's a hoot, anyway. The weird thing is the armored character seems to use the same gestures and posture as the merchant, which just looks so silly.

Basically, when it comes to the core objective categories, very little in Blood Knights is all that bad, or all that good. Alysa's splash screen art implies she has massive hooker breasts, but she seems to lack the boob job in game and as such her design actually ends up looking pretty alright. The rest of the female cast doesn't ... Fare so well, though. The return of the Bioware ass!

So is the game actually any good? Like I said, no, it legitimately isn't an objectively quality production, but it does have its charms. The interplay between the two main characters is weirdly funny. The VA for Jeremy is either directed better or just has more enthusiasm for the part, which makes the way they bounce lines off each other pretty funny. He's got a bit of gusto and the Alysa VA is just like "can I go home now" which works really well with her beleaguered character's role in the story. I actually really like how cliche and grizzled Jeremy looks when played against that voice acting, it really reminds me of B-movie line delivery. I kinda wish they just bantered a bit more

actually I guess she looks worse at the start of the game

I didn't run into too many geometry errors and the game never crashed on me, which is weirdly refreshing. As a pick up and play game it was oddly quality, with few aggravating design decisions and little in the way of annoyances. I mean no, it's not a great game, but it doesn't do anything too stupid or annoying, so as long as you appreciate it in a tongue in cheek way it worked mostly just fine.

The coop thing might honestly be the game's biggest design pitfall and biggest selling point. If you have a friend and a couple hours to kill, the game is a dopey brawler with reasonable coop options. On the other hand the choice to have coop hurts the game - if they had emphasized making Alysa and Jeremy rather different, the game play might have been really interesting. They do play and control differently, which is nice, but it's basically like having two kinds of hammers for the same job. Sure, they feel a little differently, but the difference between a wooden mallet and an aluminum ball peen isn't that great a gulf.

Anyway, in summary the game should have been titled "Vampire Plan from the Sealed Crypt: Fangs for Blowing up the Moon!" If you can read that title, and laugh a little, you might have a bit of fun with this rather hohum game. If not, it's nothing memorable, though I do love how one of the animations during conversations is the hands together mister burns type thing.

I'm actually a little disappointed in just how nothing this game is. It didn't overstay its welcome, the story was generic but nothing too stupid, the VAs did a decent enough job and the combat was fine. It's not really a "bad" game. It's just an average game.

And that means we need to take things ... A step further...