Bloodborne Review

Core Gameplay is Still Great

Bloodborne is a Dark Souls game - not by it's moniker, but still very much in spirit. You explore an area, collect souls blood echoes, collect items, and fight bosses. Within the first 30 minutes, I felt that immense hack-and-slash satisfaction that the Soulsborne games provide in spades.

Areas in Bloodborne, like the previous games, have brilliant tension between the player vying to reach the next checkpoint (lamp or shortcut) and the enemies adding just the right amount of challenge to make it feel like an accomplishment to clear every area.

Killing things in Bloodborne is fun. The animations are fantastic, every hit feels powerful, and parrying is ridiculously satisfying. I'm going to be saying quite a few negative things about the game later, so I think it's important to stress that the combat feels very good, and it alone carries the game very far.

Trick Weapons are Fantastic, Blood Vials Aren't

Bloodborne changes a few things from the Dark Souls games. It's worth going over a few of them and how I feel they panned out.

Trick Weapons

The weapon system is the shining gem of Bloodborne. Each weapon in Bloodborne has two forms, which effectively doubles the breadth of each weapon's moveset.

For example, I used the Kirkhammer for most of the game. The normal form of the weapon is a relatively standard sword which I found comfortable coming from Dark Souls. The second form (which can be changed to mid-combo) is a giant hammer. The hammer brought CC and the potential for slow, devastating blows while the sword allowed me to strike quickly.

In Dark Souls, you could switch your weapon to be two-handed, but that didn't really give you the full arsenal that the trick weapons provide. In Bloodborne you can play multiple styles simultaneously without even changing your equips.

No Shield!

I used the shield quite extensively in Dark Souls, so I expected adjusting to Bloodborne would be challenging but it felt pretty natural in Bloodborne. It encourages dodging and aggressive play - which is enjoyable.

It isn't perfect though. I found myself getting one-shot far more in Bloodborne than I did in Dark Souls, which is never a fun experience. The potential to get one-shot was always there in Dark Souls, but shielding strong attacks would at least mitigate the blows. Because there is no such safety net - if you get caught in the wrong location in Bloodborne, you're probably dead.

Blood Vials

Dark Souls had an Estus Flask. It allowed you to heal yourself, had multiple charges, and would refill itself whenever you visited a bonfire. This allowed you to replay difficult areas/bosses/etc. many times so even if you sucked, you would always have the resources to try again.

This is not the case in Bloodborne.

Bloodborne replaces Estus with Blood Vials, which are dropped randomly by most melee enemies, or can be purchased with blood echoes. You can carry 20 vials at once, and they are refilled from storage whenever you respawn.

Unfortunately, this means if you fight a boss over and over again, you will quickly run out of your stock of vials, forcing you to go off and farm them. I think I'm relatively decent at the Soulsborne games and I still had to go farm blood vials 4-5 times, which was really disruptive to the normal flow of the game.

Okay, Lovecraft, I Get It

Everyone knows Bloodborne is a dark game. It's a really... really dark game. For me the themes of the game got pretty tiring about halfway through. I was never scared or truly disturbed by the game, but the mood of the game gets worse and worse over the course of the game. It's definitely intentional, but hearing a baby cry in the distance every 5 minutes for 20 hours gets old pretty fast.

This trend extends to all aspects of the game. Because the theme is "Victorian but super fucked up" - every single aspect of the game is limited to that constraint. The music is always screeching and cacophonous, the enemies all wail and shriek, and half of the bosses are just a monstrous mess of limbs.

You could change the game to be greyscale and I don't think you would lose that much. In fact, it might be quirky enough to be an improvment over the gray-maroon color palette that is present throughout the entire game.

I'm not kidding, you can hear the baby crying from pretty much everywhere, eventually

Won't Age Well Without a Remaster

From a technical standpoint, Bloodborne will likely need a remaster to feel good to play during the next generation of games. The game is limited to 30 FPS but is unable to maintain that framerate when there are sufficient particle effects, even on my PS4 Pro with Boost Mode enabled. It just feels like I'm trying to run it on a machine that it really shouldn't be on.

Going from playing Dark Souls III on my PC to playing Bloodborne on the PS4 was a difficult adjustment. Bloodborne has a sufficient following that I expect we will see a remaster in it's future that will bring the experience into 60 FPS, 4K definition glory.

Final Score: 7

A grim take on Dark Souls that requires an appetite for Lovecraftian horror.

Scoring Context

Every reviewer gives scores in different ways. Dunkey scores on a 0-5 scale, Cr1tikal has his Moist Meter, and IGN gives every game a 9. I score on the classic 0-10 scale.

Any game that gets less than a 4, I either didn't finish, or I would actively discourage people from playing. Games in the 5-7 range I probably enjoyed but wouldn't be tempted to play a second time. Games with an 8 or more I thoroughly enjoyed and would recommend to anyone who has similar taste.