Bloodhound

Review

Are you ready to pulverise the cult of Astaroth and send her once and for all where she belongs? But you need to be fast, to have plenty of good reflexes and to be super-armed to defeat her and her devilish minions. It won’t be easy, and you are about to rock hell in Bloodhound.

Bloodhound is a first-person shooter game developed and self-published by Kruger & Flint Productions on the 19^th of July 2023 on the Steam platform. The game is also available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 4 and 5.

The game consists of five acts where you must go through an onslaught of enemy waves throughout each act until you reach a boss fight. But first, and after selecting the difficulty level (easy, normal or hard), you’ll be greeted with a comic-book-style introduction with cool illustrations before you start fighting your way through the game.

It is a fun and fast indie title, and I must say that I enjoyed my few hours playing it. As you might know by now, I play all the games as they are supposed to be played, and therefore, I always choose the normal difficulty. It took me around three hours to complete the game on that difficulty level, so I restarted it on the harder difficulty to see the difference. The enemies are harder to kill, and I experienced my first death early in the act. Compared to dying only once on my first playthrough (normal difficulty), I thought it was good for the replayability aspect of the game, as it is quite short for an FPS.

I enjoyed that you constantly fight enemies as you go through the levels, especially when confined to small areas, which occurs often in this game. And then there are the boss fights on top of that. But the fact that you have so many health packs, and so much armour and ammunition for your weapons diminishes the experience, in my view. Don’t get me wrong, it is super fun to play, but perhaps it is a bit too generous for the gamers. 

As you progress through the game, you’ll find weapons, some of which you can use with both hands, such as the revolver, the submachine gun, heavy machine gun, and my favourite is the dual mini shotgun. One of the shotguns has a hook that you can shoot into an enemy, and then grab the enemy and drag it back to you super-fast. With the other gun, you can send the enemy back to hell in a heartbeat. You’ll find a few other things to help you through the levels. The sand timer perk will slow down the enemy's movement for a short time when activated, the bullet perk will inflict more damage for a short time, and the syringe will give you a burst of speed for a short time.  The other thing you can use is the devil form perk. You see, as you kill an enemy, a red circle will be dropped, which will only be available to collect for a few seconds. As you collect the red circles, they will accumulate in a circular gauge, and when it hits 100 points and activates the perk, you’ll be invisible and super deadly for . . .  you guessed it, a few seconds.

That brings me to the enemies and weapons. I feel that the weapons are generally lenient in regards to the accuracy. Because the action was super-fast, I felt that it was too generous toward me when using the machine gun while turning around or moving sideways. It was the same with other weapons; I think the balance needs to be adjusted a bit. I really like some of the enemies, especially the ones that use their swords to reflect your bullets back to you. The animations are good, too.

In terms of the levels, they are good and straightforward but nothing special. Yes, you have a few secret rooms to find, but essentially, you must find three keys of different colours to open doors and move forward until you reach the red gate and fight a boss. The boss fights are fun but relatively easy.  It will take you a few looks to understand their sequences.

The graphics are good, and if you enjoy a bit of heavy metal music, you will surely love the soundtrack. I didn’t mind it, as it suited the game perfectly.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Bloodhound Steam Store Page