Blood II: The Chosen + Expansion

I went in expecting the same gleeful carnage that made the original Blood a cult classic, and Blood II delivers exactly half of that promise. The setting has jumped a hundred years forward to a Blade Runner-ish 2028, with the demonic Cabal now rebranded as the mega-corporation CabalCo. Caleb is still the sardonic undead gunslinger cracking dark one-liners - that part holds up - but the haunted mansions and robed cultists of the first game have been replaced with generic slums, factories, and office corridors that could belong to any late-90s shooter. The atmosphere drop is real and noticeable from the first level. On the mechanics side, things get more interesting. You pick one of four Chosen - Caleb, Ophelia, Ishmael, or Gabriella - each with different marksmanship ratings, hit point ceilings, and armor tolerances. The story campaign locks you into Caleb, but the character stats change how aggressively you need to play. The arsenal runs to 17 weapons across 10 slots, meaning you have to make loadout decisions on the fly, and most guns carry a secondary fire mode: the MAC-10 can go shoulder-aimed for accuracy at the cost of fire rate, for example. Permanent akimbo is also available without a power-up, though dual-wielding kills your alternate fire access, so there are real trade-offs to manage. The problem is that enemy AI is genuinely weak - opponents often stand still until you walk directly into their line of sight, and difficulty comes more from enemies absorbing punishment in packs than from any intelligent behavior. Pacing is the other sore spot: long stretches of warehouse-to-warehouse corridor walking, and a subway level that overstays its welcome by about eight repetitions. The Nightmare Levels expansion, bundled in here at no extra cost, is worth calling out separately because it actively course-corrects several of the base game's worst instincts. Six new single-player levels lean back into gothic atmosphere - snowy hedge mazes, haunted mansions, western tableaux - and the robed cultists from the original finally show up, alongside two new weapons (a combat shotgun and the divisive Flayer) and new enemies including gremlins and the Nightmare boss itself. The narrative framing is clever: a deceased Gideon narrates each Chosen's personal nightmare story from inside his own skull. It is short, completed in a few hours, and the final level spikes in difficulty hard, but as a bonus package that also patches bugs in the base game it punches above its weight. The BloodBath multiplayer mode also gains new options here, including the inexplicably entertaining Zombie Head Soccer. So who should actually play this? Fans of the original Blood who want more Caleb and can forgive a tonal step down, retro FPS collectors who want the complete package, and anyone curious about Monolith's LithTech engine work before No One Lives Forever. If you have never played the first Blood, start there - this sequel assumes you care about the characters and will disappoint you faster if you don't. Newcomers to the era who bounced off Quake II's sterility might actually find Blood II's black humor and over-the-top dismemberment system more fun than its 72 Metacritic score suggests, as long as they go in with realistic expectations about level design. The mouse controls require some fiddling to feel right by modern standards, so set aside ten minutes with the options menu before writing off the feel.

Alex · Scout Team

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