Blood Knights Review - Bad, but good
Blood Knights is a budget game developed by Deck 13 and published by Kalypso Media you’d half expect to see on a PlayStation 2; the visuals look very dated (at least on Xbox 360), both graphically as well as the animation and sound departments. The story is laughable and barely makes any sense, and the bored and overall terrible voice acting doesn’t help. It’s a recipe for disaster, yet, for some very odd reason, it’s kinda fun. Blood Knights is like a terrible B-movie; it’s so bad, so ridiculous, that you can’t help but love it in a way.
The game begins outside an ancient temple, during the aftermath of a huge battle between humans and vampires. It seems like the humans, despite the terrible losses, have managed to win the battle, and must now enter the temple to recover the Blood Seal, an ancient artifact which is important because the game says so. Our protagonist, Jeremy, needs to be bonded with a vampire archer called Alysa for reasons which are also never explained. The bottom line is that Jeremy and Alysa, despite being two different races that hate each other, must work together in order to help retrieve the Blood Seal. During the mission, however, Jeremy gets bitten and turns into a vampire himself whereas another group of vampires manages to take off with the seal.
Despite being shunned by his former human friends, Jeremy decides to retrieve the Seal and save humanity, hoping to also find a cure for his vampirism and end his bond with Alysa - who is forced to follow and help Jeremy otherwise she dies, or something like that.
Blood Knights‘s plot is very predictable, and you can already guess what will happen next as you hack and slash your way through the game’s rather short campaign. There are no twists or alternate endings, even the “moral choices” you are given don’t affect the outcome of the story and just change a few lines of dialogue at best. In my playthrough, I found all the human characters to be annoying and all the vampire characters to be slightly less annoying, therefore I sided with the latter. I was pretty upfront about it too, I always helped them and screwed over the humans every chance I got and despite all that the game still played out as if Jeremy wanted to redeem himself and gain the human’s affection once more.
Being a vampire has its benefits, however, you can suck blood from foes or dying humans to replenish your health and you can use your powers to manipulate certain objects in the environment to assist you. These vampire powers help break the combat from what would otherwise be a simple button masher and gives Blood Knights it’s own little identity. Despite that, the game’s mechanics are awfully simple, and most combat encounters involve you dealing damage with Alysa, clearing groups of enemies with Jeremy, and sucking blood to regain health.You’ll need to use both characters as they do have completely different skill sets; Jeremy is limited to melee weapons compared to Alysa who is limited to ranged, but the gameplay itself is very similar. You can invite a friend to tag along and play through the campaign locally, however, there is no online option with the exception of leaderboards.
With every kill and mission, you earn XP and level up in typical RPG fashion. Each level makes you stronger and gives you one skill point to upgrade your moves. Despite having a decent amount of upgrades to choose from, none of them are particularly good and barely change how the game is played. The same can be said about the game’s items; you will find lots of new weapons and armors, however, they all just give basic stats that improve your character’s damage or armor and nothing else. It would have been nice to see certain weapons which have added effects or items which grow in power the more items of that set you own. There is barely any difference from the start of the game to the end, you’ll be using the same moves and the same techniques, the only change is that the numbers that appear every time you hit an enemy are a little bigger.
I played through the majority of the game controlling Alysa, as she was by far the more useful of the two characters. Her long range meant I could kill enemies before they even saw me and, by exploiting the environment, you could safely fire from places out of the enemies’s reach. She also moves faster than Jeremy, meaning I could traverse the levels more quickly and outrun the majority of the enemies. The only times I did switch to Jeremy was if I got cornered and had nowhere to run.
It may seem like Blood Knights is just a terrible game, which it is, but at least it’s a terrible game you can still enjoy. Despite its dated looks and low budget, I barely encountered any bugs or glitches and, as ridiculous as the story gets, it’s just entertaining to see what could possibly happen next. I mean, within the first chapter the moon shatters. And this is all in the first 15 or 20 minutes. How many games do that?! The voice acting is equally ridiculous, with the voice actors sounding bored out of their minds as they slowly read out their script. There will be many moments in the game where things happen because of “reasons”, and the game is content with leaving it at that. How did an old priest get to the top of a mountain infested by vampires before you? Because, reasons. Why does Jeremy give two shits about saving humanity when clearly everyone one hates him and he’s a vampire now? Also, reasons. It’s hilarious. It’s bad, but still hilarious.
Overall, the game will set you back $15 on XBLA, PSN and PC, which is kind of steep considering the campaign is barely four hours long and offers next to no replay value. Once the story is over, it’s over. There is no reason to go back unless you want to replay the game on Hard or want to find every collectible, however, you can probably do both in your first playthrough regardless. I did enjoy my time with the game, but I find it difficult to recommend. If you are bored and have a friend over, you could do much worse than Blood Knights, however, for your average gamer, Blood Knights is just sub-par in all aspects.