BLOOD

Decided to give this game a propper go while chipping away at FFX. Felt the need for a propper shooter and never dove into this one, and keep hearing great things.

I have Blood: Fresh Supply which, while inferior, does work out of the box, so I'm going to give that a chance first. So far finished the first mission on Lightly Broiled Difficulty (is that a good setting to start on?). Forgot to save though and got absolutely creamed in mission 2 forcing a restart.

Fun game so far! Did have to enable "3d camera" to make aiming up and down less braindeath inducing if you get me.

I didn’t know the 3D camera option was a thing. I had to stop playing because aiming up and down was literally making me nauseous.

It's in Fresh Supply under Gameplay options IIRC called " full 3d aim look option". Definitely worth using!

I also have Fresh Supply - it's useful to have no experience with the original when playing an inferior version, so I'll probably go for this one too out of convenience.

Keep us updated on your playthrough, interested to hear how you think it stacks up against other FPS classics! I ordered a Razer Tartarus keypad yesterday, so I might give Blood a go to help christen it when it arrives.

Good to know, I’ll give it another try here soon.

Played a bit more, finished E1M2. Trying to do it without quick-save spamming but this game does not fuck around. Managed to get all secrets so far by sheer luck and exploration, I really like them. They are just vague enough to enlisit exploration and not obscure enough to have to resort to guides.

I really enjoy the exploration once again and it is a highlight. Feel modern shooters really miss that part, how each thing found is an asset. Be it armour, health, akimbo etc. Love how good each weapon is.

Maranax infirmux!

>Fresh Supply
Yeah it's fine to use just to start. The Voodoo Doll at the start of Episode 2 is where I really started to notice the bugs, that weapon is really scuffed on FS.

>Difficulty level
Well Done is what you should play on once you are familiar with the game, however Blood is pretty hard so don't feel bad about starting on something lower to get your bearings. Some of the difficulty of the game is also frontloaded, the early levels have you facing a shitton of cultists without much ammo or many of your weapons, so it does get a bit easier later on. Not that much easier though. Extra Crispy was designed for co-op and pushes enemy HP out of key breakpoints (ex. double barrel blast no longer 1HK's zombies) so don't play that difficulty.

>Weapons
One of the greatest weapon rosters in FPS. Almost every weapon's primary and alt fire are useful. Use the dynamite, it is an absolutely critical weapon. Bounce it off walls with the alt fire (alt fire to light the fuse, then throw it) to soften up difficult rooms by taking out key cultists in advance.

>Quicksave
It's useful for getting a feel for how to approach difficult encounters, especially with how fast some of them can kill you if you are unprepared. (Dining car...) Of course as you get better, you won't need it as much.

Played some more, beat E1M3 and E1M4. M3 was super fun, there was a room filled with enemies but I managed to get the reflect (found that after doing the fight haha, then reloaded) to just have them kill themselves. The room with all the luggage was not fucking around. Love how you can just blow shit up. When the cultists fly all across the room it's glorious.

The Carnival was a lot of fun too. I'm finding myself hover around 20-60 health nearly constantly unlike other shooters like DOOM or Quake. Pretty interesting. Haven't had a healthpick up yet that I didn't need. Love the secrets once again. Fantastic game.

Finished Episode 1. Just all around fantastic, what gorgeous level design and blowing shit up has never been this fun haha. Very iconic enemies with nice lines.

Final boss was a bit of a pushover. Managed to get him into a melee loop by sticking just in his melee range but outside of his shooting-range and just clobbered him with shotgun shells. Guy took quite a beating though.

Found one weird thing in the second to last level. Was on the outside and saw a gargoyle in the far-far-far-far distance. Shot a rocket their way and suddenly three insanely agressive gargoyles rushed me from the distance. Really weird but funky.

Found two super-secrets total. One in the first level (that I knew from a vid) and the other by complete accident haha (fell down from the plateau into the clouds, only to land on them).

Looking foward to playing the other episodes. Are they as good as EP1?

>Voice acting/Lines
SSS tier, ridiculously good. Stephen Weyte's Caleb makes the constant stream of references out of his mouth sound natural. Cultists are hilarious to listen to. One of my favorite things is how the cultists normally only talk in their own language, but if you set them on fire they "break character" in a panic and switch to English for their final words ("It burns, it burns!").

>Episodes
Episode 1 is my favorite, but the others are also very good. Episode 2 is pretty close, some great levels in there with an awesome theme overall. Haven't played Post Mortem or Cryptic Passage, need to get around to that.

>Cheogh/Stone Gargoyles
He is really spongy, you can kite him around or use a glitch to kill him easily. If you crouch and stand next to him there is a bug in his AI that will prevent him from attacking you, so you can just hammer away with whatever. If you don't want to do that (I think the ports have a config option to fix it?) then the Voodoo Doll and Tesla Cannon work well, other weapons get resisted and take a while to do the job.

> voice lines
"Ophillia...NooOO9000OooooOOo00" is the absolutely creme of the crop for me haha

> breaking character when on fire
Fantastic detail, didn't think about that.

Had a little go of this tonight, just beat the Carnival level. I echo most of Raeng's comments, really - great selection of weapons and enemies, unforgiving (in a fun way), good levels. Plenty of charm and humour, despite being a dark game. Campy in the most enjoyable way.

The comment on "every health kit has been needed" has been ringing very true for me! There's a balance of encounters you csn react to on the fly, and others where they clearly expect you to die and think about how you can go in better prepared next time. The dynamite is a brilliant weapon - even something as simple as "hold to adjust throwing distance" adds a fun skilful element to its use. I like being able to kick the dismembered heads around too. Fun game so far!

Awesome to hear! The Carnival is a fantastic level. Lots of little secrets there too (never could find them all). The weapons keep on getting better, especially in how the levels play alongside them. And yeah the damage output of enemies is crazy, in a good way. What difficulty are you playing on?

Lightly Broiled, which I think is the one you started off on too if I remember correctly? It certainly doesn't mess about, even at a mid-level difficulty. You absolutely need that quick save function to learn the game.

Do you play with the auto-aim on? I left it on as it was the default but I feel like it sometimes directs my shots away from enemies. It could just be me, though. I did the first mission of Episode 2 before I finished for the night, I like the opening with the moving boat and the wintery environment. I'll probably play some more tonight. Playing Blood gave me a bit of an old-school Doom itch, so I may have to revisit those games too. I don't think I ever finished Doom 2...

>auto-aim
I didn't use it, since there is full vertical mouse aiming you don't really need it.

>Doom
Highly, highly recommend Plutonia. IMO it completely blows id-made Doom levels out of the water, much more consistent, creative, and engagingly difficult.

Doom as a foundation is excellent, but it radically relies on it's map design. The quality of every single enemy lives and dies by where it is placed, what other monsters are present, where those other monsters are placed, what weapons and ammo you have access to for the fight, etc. When those factors don't come together, it's annoying or a snorefest, but when they do, you get a surprisingly strategic experience.

Finished Episode 2 yesterday. Not as good as the first one, but still quite enjoyable. The new enemies were fun additions, although the end boss was a bit of a disappointment. It was harder to kill the Gargoyle thing (boss that reappears from Episode 1), although I can't say I like fighting it. You can either cheese it by crouching, or fight it properly, but it has an insane amount of health. Neither option is particularly fun, for me.

After Episode 1 I was looking forward to jumping in to 2. After finishing Episode 2, I'm not as excited about starting 3. I might take a little break. It seems like it might be a recurring theme with the FPS legends that they start off with their best episode.

I haven't touched EP2 yet outside of the first few levels, got distracted by other stuff and doing a rerun of EP1. Glad to hear you're still liking it though!

Played this one year ago but dropped it off at E3. Restarted it recently and I've finished all 4 episodes on Well Done. This time I played on Raze, which seems to be accurate and has some cool options.

Needless to say that it's a great shooter. What really sets it apart are the weapons. Since all of them are great (both primary and secondary fire) and ammo is pretty common you have a lot of ways of doing any given encounter. The only attacks that don't convince me are the primary fire of the Life Leech and the secondary fire of the Vodoo Doll, but I need to experiment with them more. Another thing I kinda dislike is the fact that more than half of the weapons are either fire or explosion based, which isn't that bad but I would have appreciated something more unique. The Life Leech is cool until you realize it's another fire weapon.

The enemies are also pretty great, hitscanners especially. While I dislike that they don't give indication of their presence (unlike something like DOOM's hitscanners), there are ways around this, like using the 3rd person camera to look around corners. They will shred you on sight but only if you don't attack them. If you hit them they will stumble a bit taking cover and crouching without attacking for something like 2 seconds (they don't have to get into a pain state, they just need to get hit once), which gives you ample time to kill them with whatever you want. This makes fighting them a lot more interesting. The alt fire of the Tommy Gun is especially good for this, since you will hit everything in a wide arc at least once.

The other enemies are also good, but I had to avoid crouching against Butchers and Gargoyles to avoid making them a joke. There is a section at the end of an E2 level where you are against something like 20 Butchers but in practice it's a joke since they can't really hurt you if you crouch.

Level design is top notch, like most of the other elements of the game. Lots of secrets, alternate routes and ways to break a level. They are intricate without being too annying about it (most of the time), unlike some of DOOM's maps which can get pretty ridiculous in that regard. I would have liked some more gimmick levels here and there to spice things up, especially in E3 and 4, but it's not that big of a deal.

Difficulty is hard but it's doable. Can't imagine doing it with no quicksaving, but I could try in the future.

Yeah it's a great game, apparently the Death Wish custom maps are also very good so I gotta get around to that sometime.

Also finished Post Mortem. Harder than E1 through 4. Much more cultist and Hellhounds ambushes. The maps managed to be both more simple but also more confusing to navigate, really weird. Now onto Cryptic Passage.
Tried the Life Leech a bit more and it's amazing against cultists, but so are the Flare Gun, Spray Canister, Napalm Launcher and the various explosives. It has a bit too much competition.

>Death Wish
After I'm finished with the normal maps I will definitely play this one. I've seen some videos and it looks amazing. Much more advanced than the normal Blood maps. It reminds me of Ion Storm.

Death Wish is phenomenal and frequently exceeds the quality of Monoliths work. Its incredibly memorable and very well paced, the guy who made it just gets what makes Blood work.

Probably best to wait for 2.0 next year with the new episode and existing redesigns.

I've pitchtfork started all 5 episodes of Blood on Well Done (I've yet to finish Cryptic Passage, but just from playing first 2 lvls I don't think it will standout from over all experience) - pretty fun experience, albeit tedious at times with pitchforking and trail n' error.

I'm especially sick of gargoyles. Such an braindead enemies that often get stuck when flying and it's annoying to get them down (wraiths are guilty of it too). Also they're quite tanky, so there is an incentive to pitchfork-circlestrife them when there aren't that much resources, but it gets boring really fast and Tesla gun take care of them really easy later on thankfully.

Zombies are too very easy to kill just by getting to higher elevation, since their attack doesn't seem to reach vertically, but I really like how you can us them to boost yourself.

It's great how unconventional weapons are with various utilities - Voodoo doll's 2ndary is a BFG knockoff, Life Leech's is a turrent that can be pushed around with pitchfork, 2ndary of tommy gun is really good at clearing spiders, hands and other pests. However, as Hyperfist noted there are too many fire weapons that fit the same role with only difference being availability. This can be annoying against tougher enemies, like stone gargoyles (although 2nd of life leech is really good against them).

I've played with mouse look on Fresh supply version and camera tends to shift up and down on slopes - edit: there is option to turn off slop tilting lol. It can be also hard to hit some enemy sprites from high up or under water, since they're not fully 3d. Shelob is wierd example. The only effective strat I found on her is jumping on her with shotgun, because other weapons do jackshit, but it's very specific and odd angle that's easy to miss and I dunno why it works, because shooting her normally with shotgun isn't that effective. Some of those issues are probably solved by auto-aim, but I didn't test that.

I've enjoyed Post Mortem the best. I really liked the inclusion of green and blue cultists. Non-hitscanners cultists really bring variety to encounters, especially green ones, which I like to use to kill fodder enemies. Except the final boss, which blows (like all boss in this game tbh). Like many enemies, it has rock-paper-scissors balance with its weaknesses and game goes to far with it. Mentioned Beasts are weak to fire and you can empty entire Tesla gun and don't even kill one and there are 3 of them in E6M8. No idea why designers even bother to give you one if it useless.

It's also cool how non-linear some lvls can be. It's very satisfying to sneak up on cultists. It feels very natural that you want to utilze hidden paths, windows and elevations to get advantage on them with how merciless they're. E2M5 can be beaten under a minute by jumping on zombies and getting moon key early.

When that finishes, maybe try "BLOOM" (mod combining it with DOOM).

NOTE: This aside from a Rogue-lite "Doom Infinite". Maybe it suits you. Maybe it doesn't. Hard to say.

>BLOOM
Shit, it already has wikipedia page lol. I remember playing it for a while ago and I wasn't thrilled by this mix.It didn't particulary seem to me like it had strenghts of any of those 2 games.

I've been curious about Shadow Warrior Redux (you've played this one, or none redux version?),but as of now, I want to finish Cryptic Passage and play something other than a shooter.

>Doom Infinite
They had to turn Doom into rouge-lite?