My first impressions of Bloodbath were of mild curiosity; the screenshots looked pretty cool and, as someone who enjoys a random match or two of any Mortal Kombat game or 90s-era clone, Bloodbath seemed intriguing. The scant 540MB size of the game gave me some pause for concern, and as it booted up I became a little more concerned. As with most games, Bloodbath gives users a warning not to power off while the game is saving. A simple grammatical error (no space after a period) in this message that appears at every boot-up was noticeable, but hey, even the big AAA games make mistakes. But this simple, easily forgivable oversight was only the first of many other far more important issues.
The premise of Bloodbath is simple. It’s an arena-based third person fighting game with six unique characters, six arenas, and five game modes. The idea is that you have these six “Pit Dogs” who battle it out in the “Dog Eat Dog” tournament, for no apparent reason other than to entertain the cheesy announcer dude and a bunch of roaring fans in the background. The six fighters include Guerilla, who has machetes and uses a gas grenade as his special ability. Santos, who became my favorite, is a big Lucha Libre wrestler, and his Haggar-like (think Final Fight or Zangief) spinning arms move is pretty devastating. Similar to Santos as far as a tank-like character is Berserker, who, like Thor, carries a massive hammer and can summon a lightning strike from the sky. Gladius looks like a Roman-era gladiator, including helmet, mask, and shield. He uses a sword attack and has a better block ability than the other characters (it consumes less Stamina for him to block). Geisha, unlocked at Level 15, is light on defense but attacks quickly. And then there’s Jock, who has a cannonball he can shoot at a target; he also skates around like a fool and uses a modified hockey stick. Each fighter has three special attacks, and one ability that requires a meter to fill up before you can use it. When the meter is full, you can charge it up to increase the damage it does, depending on what Level you are at. Furthermore, if you get several consecutive kills, you can activate your Rage mode, which lets you instantly takedown an enemy.
Bloodbath has a few other mechanics players will need to take note of. First, players attack with X and Y, Normal and Strong attack respectively. The key is to use combos of X and Y, up to four in length (so XYYX, or YYXY, etc) to perform special moves. The special moves for each character is viewable from the start menu. I liked that the special moves are all easy to remember and execute, similar to recent Mortal Kombat games. There’s also Stamina to account for. Stamina plays a significant role, actually too much of a role if you ask me. Each fighter has a stamina meter and as you block, attack, and dodge-roll, you lose Stamina. You can replenish it by pressing B and chugging a drink; when you press B, your player starts to drink from this bottle, and if you press B again as a slider moves over a marker (think of this like a two second mini-game), your stamina gets completely refilled instead of just partially. Note that Stamina is not the same as your health meter, the latter of which cannot be refilled.
There is a leveling system as well, with points that can be spent towards four categories including Stamina, Health, Special Ability, and Damage. For Special Ability, you do not unlock more of them, you just reduce the amount of time it takes to be able to reuse your ability. Different tiers of leveling give other bonuses too, such as being able to Taunt once you reach level 5 and at level 25 you can use the Hyper Charge mode of your Special Ability.
A lot of this sounds good or at least ok on paper, but when you actually get into the game, things tend to fall apart quickly, and regardless of which game mode you’re playing. Let’s run through the modes while we’re at: Bloodbath is the standard free-for-all, kill and don’t be killed mode where it’s all about getting points. Watch for the ticking timer signaling the end of the match and any arena traps like rotating spike pillars, etc., that can spell instant death. In Judgment, you can play 2v2 or 3v3. The goal is to score more points than the other team, but to score points, you have to see the challenge that pops up on screen and complete the challenge in the time allotted, such as getting x number of kills in a certain amount of time. Powerzones on either side of the arena allow players to restore their health or lose it, if you wander into the enemy Powerzone. The Wagon, like much of the game itself, is a neat concept, I just wished it worked better. The goal is to push a heavy wagon towards the enemy Powerzone; the closer it is, the more points you get. Finally, in Domination, the goal is to control strategic points and keep the enemy from capturing them. There are three such points, and the more you control them, the more points you get. Whoever has the most points as time expires, wins. As you may have noticed, there is no Story mode at all, but you can play all of these modes offline against bots in the Training mode.
Speaking of playing against bots, that’s all I was able to do. Over the course of a few days and nights, I randomly tried to find any public or ranked match online, and never did. A three minute timer is used when you first start searching for a match, and I saw that rundown to zero many times; other times I just started the match anyway and played against bots. As far as I know, this isn’t some kind of issue on my end, because the game never complained about not being able to get online or anything like that. By the way, you don’t even assign the name of your online character; the game takes the name of your computer as its assigned in Windows, and adds two or three numbers after it. Anyway, initially I spent most of my time playing the straight-forward Bloodbath mode, but this gets tiresome fast. In a small arena, you have six characters (me and five bots) running around, all just trying to hack each other to death. It felt completely muddled, cheap, and unsatisfying, with the easiest tactic being to attack someone from behind as they were being attacked by someone else from the front. Special ‘boss’ characters add some interest, but overall this is just a jumbled mess of a mode that exposes many of the game’s problems. The Team modes are more interesting, but that’s on a scale of “not” to “barely.” In Domination, I found I could just run off and camp at one of the Strategic Points for a while, let the bots battle it out until they started running over to me, and then I would run to the next point. It was easy to win this way, but obviously not any fun, but it’s not much more fun to actually engage in combat, either. I experienced a crazy bug in The Wagon too, in which suddenly my character and another one or two of the bots were suddenly floating several feet off of the ground, above the other bots.
Regardless of which character I chose and which mode, Bloodbath never managed to be fun or satisfying for long, if at all. I’ve played a lot of crappy fighters in the past, like Battle Monsters on Saturn and Ultra Vortek on Jaguar, but those at least have an old school / nostalgic charm to them. With Bloodbath, the game feels broken, either because it was never really finished before release or Freedom Factory was just well out of their comfort zone. In the end the reasons don’t matter as much as the outcome, which is a game whose main draw of violent combat falls well short due to sloppy combat and, surprisingly, a relatively low violence level, too. Even fans of the genre will find Bloodbath very unsatisfying to play in its current state.
To the summary…
