Review: Bloodborne - Enemy Slime

Review: Bloodborne

...even the doll, should it please you...

Playstation

Bloodborne is a spooky version of Dark Souls. You’ve heard the comparisons, it’s impossible not to draw them. I was drawing them myself from the time I first saw the game at E3 last year, and there are plenty of reasons to do so, everything from the leveling system to the combat is reminiscent of From Software’s past titles with just enough changed to help it feel fresh. I personally found that no matter how much I write about this game I can’t shake the comparison, so instead I’ll do my best to illustrate where Bloodborne deviates from the Souls series. I guess the important information before we go any further is that if you’re a Souls fan, this is very likely a game for you, in fact you probably already own it and this entire post was useless.

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Bloodborne’s story begins in the gothic city of Yharnam where your character has arrived to track down a mysterious entity known only as “paleblood”. True to its heritage, the plot of the game can be skipped in its entirety aside from a handful of thirty second cutscenes scattered throughout the world. Fans of From Software’s storytelling methods are sure to enjoy combing the game and mulling over every minutial detail. For me personally the story is some nice window dressing, an occasionally intriguing wiki read, and not much else.

So I promised that Bloodborne diverged from Dark Souls and aesthetics aside nowhere is that divergence more clear than in the game’s combat. While Dark Souls asks you to be cautious and on the defensive at all times Bloodborne’s combat is sped up and rewards aggression. The first big change is in the notable absence of shields. Yes there is a plank of wood that you can hilariously try to block with, but most players will find their offhand saddled with a firearm that can be used to disrupt and stagger opponents mid swing. The second big change is in your ability to recover from damage dealt. After an opponent strikes you, you’ll generally have a brief window where hitting them back will regain some or all of the damage they inflicted. This means that instead of rolling away after being hit it’s often better to press into your opponent and finish them off then and there. These are ultimately small changes that create enormous waves in how the game plays. It might not be to everyone’s taste, if you love Dark Souls because it’s so slow and methodical you might feel out of place here, conversely if you always wished the Souls games had a little more spring in its step, then your wish just came true, just don’t in expecting Devil May Cry.

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t spend a little more time describing “trick weapons” because they’re one of the coolest things introduced in Bloodborne. While the original Dark Souls had over 100 weapons to collect Bloodborne only offers players 15. That might sound concerningly low but each of the game’s weapons has two very distinct modes which can be toggled by pressing L1. Most weapons will morph into entirely different versions like the Hunter Axe which changes from a single handed blade to a full fledged pole arm. The asian-inspired Chikage does not morph but instead drains the players life when L1 is toggled with the benefit of doing lots more damage. Each of these weapons feels incredibly unique, and while there’s less to collect it feels like there’s just as much variety in attack styles available to you.

As I mentioned before, levelling up works very similarly to what you would expect in Dark Souls where you put points into individual stats with each increased stat equating to one new level. In fact a lot of the same items and concepts exist simply under different names. Souls are now Blood Echoes, Estus Flasks are now Blood Vials, it seems like for the most part everything just has the word blood added to it. The game only has six stats to level up (down from Dark Souls 2’s 9 stats) which does remove some complexity from your builds but also decreases your chances of pigeonholing yourself into a build that doesn’t work or throwing levels away into stats that have little effect on the game.

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I’d argue that less weapons and less stats worked out to be a good thing for the most part but the game does kind of disappoint with its handling of armor. You can no longer upgrade armor you like, instead you’ll find every set has a different load of stats and you’ll generally want to rotate them out depending on what type of damage you’re dealing with. There’s no “best armor in the game”, almost every set has some drawback that another set counters. The good news is that armor seems to have a relatively small effect on how much protection is offered to you and unless you’re specifically dealing with poison or frenzy (insanity) resistance, you can pretty much wear whatever you want without repercussions.

Healing in Bloodborne works closer to Demon’s Souls than Dark. Blood Vials are a finite resource, unlike Estus Flasks which would normally refresh every time you used a checkpoint. How happy that makes you may vary. It can definitely make you think twice before healing, but at the same time it also means that sometimes you’ll have to farm or give up Blood Echoes at a vendor before you can progress in the game.

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As you might expect online components are a big part of the game. Players can leave vague notes to one another throughout the world, bloodstains adorn the ground and allow you to watch how others have passed away before you, and of course you can also summon other players into your world to tackle the game’s bosses together. One notable addition is Bloodborne’s “password” option, which will allow you and a friend to set a matching password to facilitate co-op together. It’s great when it works, but there were at least a few times where the game’s vague matchmaking would never pair myself and a friend together despite us meeting all the requirements on paper.

Long term players can find replayability in PvP but Bloodborne also offers a new way to extend its life span in the form of Chalice Dungeons. These procedurally generated levels take place beneath the streets of Yarnham and contain some of the game’s best loot and even a few bosses that aren’t seen in the main campaign. Ultimately I found the Chalice Dungeons to be more tedious than fun but if you’re really into Bloodborne and eagerly looking for the game’s most powerful items you’ll probably want to spend some time underground. Players who generate particularly lucrative dungeons are also able to share access to them with other players online but the requirements for getting into some of them can be cumbersome at best.

Some zones have a tendency to overstay their welcome.

Some zones have a tendency to overstay their welcome.

Something I really enjoyed in Dark Souls 2 is how unique and different every zone felt. One minute you’d be in a dank crypt, and the next you’d be traversing a cliff face littered with dragons.  Bloodborne’s level design makes the world feel incredibly cohesive and interconnected but that design doesn’t really allow for much aesthetic variety. In short, you better learn to love gothic architecture, because it’s pervasive for a large majority of the game’s 30 hour runtime. Things only get worse as you progress through the game with the most interesting and unique zones shrinking down to tiny sizes and the more bland and boring ones ballooning up or forcing you to spend more time than desired in them thanks to some nasty difficulty walls.

Much has already been said about Bloodborne’s liberal loading times, but I want to extrapolate on the problem a little bit here. The issue is not so much that the load times are long as it is that the game is built to make you encounter them very frequently. Lanterns (Bloodborne’s equivalent to bonfires) no longer allow you to rest at them, instead the only thing to do when interacting with one is to return to the Hunter’s Dream which is the game’s basic hub zone. You can’t fast travel from a lantern and you can’t reset the mobs in the area, so basically if you want to do any of those things you have to wait through the load time to go back to the Hunter’s Dream and then wait through another load time to fast travel to wherever it was you wanted to go.

This enemy threw a dead body at Lucio. I think that was supposed to happen?

This enemy threw a dead body at Lucio. I think that was supposed to happen?

One night while playing I found that I’d progressed a bit too far past my level and was unable to find any co-op matches to join or host. I decided to go back and help other players with some earlier bosses, but that required that I travel between two or three lanterns before I found a spot where I could be summoned. By the time I got where I wanted to be I’d probably spent a full five minutes just staring at a black screen with the Bloodborne logo. It doesn’t sound like a big deal on paper, but it can be surprisingly fatiguing during play and is one more thing to groan about when your character bites the dust.

It’s frustrating to watch a developer not learn from their mistakes. Bloodborne is full of frame rate issues (a From Software staple) and some other peculiar design choices. For example ringing a bell to initiate a co-op search will use up a point of Insight (the game’s equivalent to Humanity) regardless of whether or not the game is able to find a co-op partner. Longtime Souls fans may recall Cracked Red Eye Orbs that initiated PVP and behaved the same way before being patched to only decrease when a session was successfully established. Why make the system work in a way that you’ve had to patch out of previous games? None of these issues hurt the game all that dramatically, but it’s still somewhat head scratching that the developer is struggling with them years later.

Toss in a few more bugged side quests and technical glitches that become more common the longer you play and you definitely have a package that will leave you eagerly awaiting the game’s next big patch. There’s nothing so heinous that it made me quit playing, but there’s definitely plenty of things that annoyed along the way.

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So that’s a lot right? I feel like there’s plenty to complain about in Bloodborne, and I do worry that the text here might undermine the score that I’ve chosen to give the game. Here’s the important message to put forward, no matter how many issues or frustrations the game provided I would always find myself happily coming back to it. It perfectly captures what makes the Souls series so special while at the same time carving out its own unique presence.

Despite its flaws Bloodborne delivers a really solid experience and is easily the best Playstation 4 exclusive to date. Is it so good that you should run out and buy a new console? Maybe not. But it is good enough to make you very glad you already have one.