Bloodborne Review

Bloodborne’s marketing leads with the slogan ‘Hunt your Nightmares’. Refreshingly, this chunk of PR speak is actually a great summation of what makes it such a remarkable game. For a lot of your playtime Bloodborne is like a nightmare. It’s fiendishly difficult and relentlessly unforgiving. Its story is elliptical and heavy with a sense of impending doom. Its enemies are so vile that they seem to have emerged unfiltered from some recess of our collective subconscious. This all adds up to an experience that is frequently testing. But when you overcome these obstacles the satisfaction is enormous and so, so empowering.

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Bloodborne shares a lot of DNA with the developers From Software’s earlier Souls series, games that put the ‘cult’ in cult classic. Proponents of those titles are notorious for being aggressively vocal in their adulation, often to the annoyance of, well, anyone who has to listen. If you are already an acolyte you shouldn’t need much persuading to get on board this time. However if you’re a newcomer, or were put off by Dark Souls’difficulty, Bloodborne is still worth your time.

You play as a voiceless hunter in the city of Yharnam, a Victorian metropolis in the grip of a disease that is turning men into beasts. It’s a unique setting that perfectly complements the story’s dark themes. As you go through the world there is a tremendous sense of progression. The environment becomes more hostile, while revisiting earlier areas often reveals that they have become shifted and warped.

Against this unforgiving backdrop you have to get to grips with a combat system unlike any other. The first thing that usually comes up in discussion about Blooborne’s fighting is its difficulty. Even the earliest enemies can take off half your health bar if you give them the chance. But to dismiss it is just a hard game doesn’t quite do it justice. Bloodborne is only hard because it has higher expectations of you than the average pampering blockbuster. It never holds your hand or eases you into difficult situations. Instead it makes it your responsibility to master the game’s systems and triumph over its challenges.

Luckily, said systems are a joy to use. The combat that takes up the bulk of your time is smooth and balletic, requiring you to keep moving and spot opportunities. If you do get hit, the game affords you a brief window to regain your health by landing blows of your own. This turns battles into something between a roulette wheel and a maths equation where you have to constantly evaluate whether it is better to fight or flee.

To help you respond to these situations you have a versatile set of weapons. Your right hand is used for ‘trick’ weapons, melee instruments that are capable of changing form at the touch of a button. My current favourite is the longsword that can be turned into a war hammer.

In your left hand you’ll usually have a firearm. But this is no shoot-em-up. Ammo is limited and it takes several shots to bring down enemies. Instead firearms are best put to the much more artful use of ‘parrying’ enemies by firing at them just as they attack. A well-timed shot will stun an enemy and leave them vulnerable to a riposte.

This may sound like a lot of mechanics but the system is incredibly versatile once you’re used to it. After a few hours you’ll have fashioned your own style of play and will be wondering why you put up with the slow pace and imprecision of other action games for all these years.
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“Bloodborne is such an exercise in craftsmanship that I could fill pages with what it gets right, from the labarinthine levels to your character’s animations”

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Criticisms? Occasional glitches and framerate drops can be irksome, likewise the lengthy loading times that add extra frustration to the inevitable restarts. There’s also not quite the same level of graphical fidelity on display as in something like The Order: 1886. However, it’s unlikely that any this will matter to you when you beat a tough boss with a sliver of health remaining, or pause to reflect over a genuinely picturesque moonlit lake.

Argh, 700 words in and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Bloodborne is such an exercise in craftsmanship that I could fill pages with what it gets right. Everything from the labyrinthine level design to your character’s animations displays a level of care and attention to detail that is rarely seen, well, anywhere. I haven’t even touched on its innovative, procedurally-generated dungeons or how the subtle multiplayer is secretly the best thing in the whole game.

Every new console takes time to establish itself, a breaking in period when shiny next-gen promises go unfulfilled. Eventually a game arrives that announces the start of the real next-gen, a game that couldn’t have been possible on older technology. For the Playstation 4, Bloodborne is that game.

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