Interesting genre

Author's Rating:

Pros: Cheap game; Some decent water effects

Cons: Boring gameplay

The Bottom Line: 
The game attempts to move the "drive and kill" genre from the road to the water. A neat idea, but not executed well.

Author's Review
OVERVIEW

If you enjoy games like Twisted Metal, but have been looking for something a little different, Bloodwake attempts to deliver. You pilot a gunboat on the seas and attempt to hunt down and destroy as many vessels as you can before getting killed. That's the object of the game... unfortunately, that's pretty much the plot as well. Basically, you have to play through the boring single-player levels in order to unlock levels and boats for multiplayer.

Multiplayer supports up to 4 players, but the pace of the game tends to drag quite a bit. Controlling boats is quite different than controlling cars. In all actuality, that is why I bought the game. I wanted something different than a car shooter, but something still in the same genre... what I found is that a boat turns MUCH slower than a car. It also accelerates and decelerates much slower... Results: a slow-paced game with guns and power-ups. You can change the weather patterns in the game and make it stormy, which creates a lot of waves. This makes turning even more difficult and slow.

Even with the "Speed" powerup, the boats still feel like they're crawling. At that point, blowing up your friends just gets tiring.

Because it's water-based, the levels are completely flat (i.e. no valleys or hills to run up and down... no places to hide, really... just flat with some rocks inbetween). That negates the notion of seek-and-destroy. There's no seeking involved. You know where they are because they can't go anywhere out of view.

This game could have been better on Jet Ski's, placed in a different time-period. That would speed up the pace and keep the water effect. Shooters should generally feel a little more frenetic than Bloodwake does. Watching paint dry feels a little more frenetic than Bloodwake does. Perhaps "Stay-awake" would have been a better title for this game.

CONTROL/MECHANICS

All boats have pretty much the same weapons: mines, machine gun, rockets, and torpedos. The controls are simple enough, but the game mechanics just make for a pretty boring experience.

Graphics and sound are nice. When the boats explode, there is plenty of splintering wood and water effects. The sounds are appropriate and not very noticable... a trait of good sound design.

Probably the most entertaining part of the game is when your ships collide and one of them is sent vertically into the air spinning. That's a pretty neat scene. The game's physics are good and the boats "feel" heavy.

SCORE

4/10