Game: Blood Will Be Spilled
Genre: 2D Tactics, Platformer
System: Nintendo Switch (and PC)
Developers|Publishers: Doublequote Studio | Attu Games
Price: US $14.99| AU $22.00 |CA $ 18.36 |£13.00| €14,49
Age Rating: EU 12+ | AU M| US T
Release Date: 20th February 2020
Review code used, with many thanks to Attu Games
This game contains blood and some cursing.
Jack the mosquito, is a bounty hunter and finds a poster for his old friend Shorty. While that one gets away he soon finds plenty of old friends with bounties and a common thread.
Shooting Straight
Blood Will Be Spilled is half 2D tactical shooter. You have two action points per turn, with options to shoot, use skills, move, drink a health potion or throw dynamite. Movement can take one or two points depending on how far you go. While you are shown a bit of the trajectory it peters out at the end so you’ll need to use your judgement. The aiming can feel a touch finicky as all but one gun, has weight. Meaning the aiming will move up and down. Headshots do deal more damage so there’s not much reason to try for anything else. Of course he can’t just shoot straight up or down so positioning is important. Obstacles can get in your way such as cover, hard or reflective surfaces. Some things that might be helpful like lanterns, that you drop on others to stun them, often got in my way.
Skills require blood to be used, which can be gained when you’re scored at the end of a fight. Which is based on turns taken, health loss and your combat performance. If you’re right next to an enemy you can’t shoot and have to use your knife. If they’ll die from a melee attack you drink their blood instead (getting drops and saving an action use). Blood can also be gained from standing atop the corpses of freshly killed enemies. Early on you pick one of three paths, the good, the bad and the ugly. These determine what skills you can gain, as you get skill points usually at the start of a new chapter. I picked good which gave me a ricochet, a derringer shot (that uses no action points) and free reloads among other abilities. I can’t say I used the ricochet very much at all.
It’s A Bug Eat Bug World
Enemies are defined by their insect type such as flies being the basic shot, wasps as snipers and rhino beetles having lots of health. Most fights are normal, though some might have impending reinforcements or a goal to get to. There are four boss fights in the game, only a couple of which bothered me. In later levels other elements may occur such as mites which will attack indiscriminately. Turrets and cannons are in a couple of fights but only Jack can use them and it also leaves you without cover. I say this as part way through the game you might have an ally every so often. While you’ll usually be able to control them they’re only around for select fights.
Run But Don’t Gun
I certainly wasn’t expecting half of this game to be a platformer. In-between fights you’ll need to navigate the land. It’s kind of slow like a cinematic platformer. While I got the hang of it, a lot of it involved needing to perpetually run as most platforms disappear. Since you can’t see that far ahead you usually need to start running straight away to get the timing right. He can run, though it’s slow, jump, crouch and slide. There’s a couple of sections that involve running away from something or needing to take cover. One annoyance in the early platforming sections was having spikes above your head where you need to jump, especially with the falling platforms.
The benefits of these inbetween periods are that you can reload your gun and drink health potions (often accidentally as it’s mapped to the B button). While health potions are placed mostly generously, since I often got damaged in these sections I ran into many fights with fairly low health. Thankfully the game works on a checkpoint system but in one spot I died so much it had to reload. There is a tiny bit of puzzle solving but not a lot. While the platforming isn’t terrible there are sections where it is worse. Such as one where I had to get to three places while on a timer and only having been shown the map for a brief moment.
Collecting Heads
It has a bit of exploration too, not a lot but you can collect mementos that give more info and decorate your room. More importantly the best gun in the game, the El Dorado needs to have several parts collected hiding in most levels. Inbetween story beats you’ll often return to Driftwood to collect the bounty money and can purchase the other guns from the store. I liked the Tombstone since it was the easiest to aim.
It’s A Buggy Ride
There are a few issues with the game and smaller bugs. In a fight the camera may pan away quite fast so often I might not see if I killed an enemy. Worse still was when enemies didn’t do their death animation properly. Meaning I would waste turns shooting someone already dead or get shot by someone who was actually alive.
You can only see enemy health on their turn or when they’ve taken a hit (and like I said in long sections you might not see that). When outside of battle you can only see your health if you take damage or shoot your gun. Another bug I had was in the defusing dynamite section, it ran on a timer. Even though I had defused all the dynamite the timer kept going and killed me at the end. Yet once it loaded in I had completed the task successfully.
When platforming I could hang on to an already disappeared platform. A couple of times he seemed to teleport around trying to latch onto something. This was mostly on the finished battlefields. In one case it happened when he was moving on a turn. While it doesn’t impact gameplay it looks pretty bad.
The AI itself is quite stupid. Often throwing dynamite into pits or having it roll away. I once had enemies step onto their own teammate’s dynamite and perish. In a way it makes the game relatively easy for most of it but that’s not a good thing. The final boss fight was p** easy, and I’m sure it would be regardless of your skill tree. I hadn’t even gotten the El Dorado at that point.
A Western Tale
The plot is a fairly typical Western story, it has some parts that are unique to the insectoid world of this game. Yet before those can be realized the game ends on a sequel hook. The game gives you the choice whether to take in your bounties dead or alive, yet all this does is change the cut-scenes and dialogue, it actually has no greater influence on the story.
Blood Will Be Spilled has full good voice acting, including a narrator (for both story and tutorialising) something unusual for a game this price. There is appropriate light Western music for most areas, though in one underground section I didn’t hear any at all. The game is made with really well illustrated art. The cut-scenes being nice motion comics or conversations. Cut-scene transitions often seem to be lacking all together just sort of mushing into the next thing.
Overall
I beat the game in five and a half hours which is pretty good for the price point. Blood Will Be Spilled sets out to be both a tactical shooter and a platformer, unfortunately it doesn’t do a great job of either. With slow platforming that requires speed, and shoot outs with fly-brains. While there’s a few bugs, only the death animation one actually impacts one’s ability to play the game. Even with those annoyances I enjoyed my time to some extent but was left disappointed by the end.
Final Verdict: I’m not sure.