Review | Blood High - Attention Draining
Kill Kill Kill. Those are the words video games have made me write down on the inside of my skull. There's a membrane in there that takes solid thought like paper receives from a pencil. With enough focusing I can see it any time I close my eyes. Post Void did this to me, DOOM did this to me, BLACK did this to me, No More Heroes did this to me. I always let it happen, taking slow breaths and focusing on the way they look me in the eye when they want it. I need something to feel loud, to vibrate my spine.
Blood High is a recent release — a match-three-postvoidlike (it is “like Post Void”) that leans too heavily on the ability of the artists to draw a kind of cute, fanged anime woman. That's all the style these days: a little busty, a little violent. People need health insurance and all we can still get is slightly-left-of-angry anime women. C'est la vie.
Developer shorthand has created an easy to follow template: kill more, match three, lather, rinse, repeat. If you were washing your hair it wouldn't be enough to get the roots clean. There are a dozen of these games acting out having flashy art or bigger crowds of enemies. Post Void already looks as good as these games can hope to achieve and Serious Sam has more interesting enemies to kill. One of those games came out thirty years ago.
Recently I've picked up a few of the games in this genre and it always brings to mind seeing someone at a party trying to do a magic trick they learned from a more famous magician. Dimmed suburban lighting and vaporizer haze do not lend the same atmosphere to magic tricks that bright spotlights and a hushed crowd do. The shooting is fine. The weapons are fine. Blood High is taking a performance by someone else and putting a different costume on it. Is that fine? Maybe if getting more of the same is enough.
Just like in Post Void you've gotta hold a head perpetually draining of life. It can only be filled up by dramatic acts of violence: gunshots, sword swings, heavy enemy death combo killstreaks. Warning: Dying is also a decision. Unlike in Post Void, everything here is a little miserable. With too little feedback, the twisting murder maze was replaced with First Person Shooter Arenas. For a game that leans heavy on random generation it's never enough to suffocate or crush me, make me really consider what I'm up against. There are four weapons and they all upgrade on the exact same curve. More is not always better if it means taking away from intentionally building into what the player can encounter.
Leaning more heavily on random generated chipsets is fine — if those tilesets can create something interesting. I have seen ten thousand sewer levels in my lifetime as the kind of person whose babysitter was being placed in front of what my parents called “the Nintendo”. It feels like sitting down from across a date and he immediately starts talking about his ex-girlfriend.
There's always a market for another titty-woman shooter it would seem. Maybe in 30 years we can start writing articles with headlines like “Unbelievable: This Game Doesn't Lean on Sexualisation”. Maybe then, games will have finally grown up more than Pac-Man.
I'm just kidding: most of my problem is that it's just not fun to play. A kill all pick one of three–like has to be willing to wear its best clothes from the moment you meet it. Anything less goes down like bad TV, cancelled after one season… and I don't even stick around to catch the finale. In this case I had to. We carry the player character’s head the entire game, staring back at us through our bullet-dance and murder frenzy. I don't like it when videogames try to wink at me.
BOTTOM SCORE
Blood High was played on PC.
