Bloodhound (PS4/PS5) Review

As the retro boomer shooter market continues to pile up the corpses of contenders to the throne, it becomes harder and harder to stand out in an increasingly packed genre. In jumps Bloodhound, from developers Kruger & Flint Productions, hoping to make a dent in that corpse landslide with another arena-based shooter most reminiscent of Painkiller. But does it have the blood-stained chops to climb near the top of the pile, or will it be engulfed in the continuous landslide of failures?

In Bloodhound, you’re tasked with stopping the cult of Astaroth and sending her vile NSFW hellspawn back to the fiery depths – in as many pieces as possible. Not that you’d know that from playing the game itself. To say that Bloodhound is light on story is an understatement. Aside from an opening series of comic panels displaying some gratuitous violence, there’s no context to explain what’s going on, other than that you’re decimating the legions of hell. To be fair, we’re here for the shooting, not a Shakespearean epic, but a little bit of narrative context would not be amiss.

Sadly, Bloodhound doesn’t put its best foot forward and is rife with a series of problems that put a bit of a dampener on the proceedings.

First up are the games visuals because, well, that’s what you’ll notice first. Bloodhound is a low-resolution, low-polygon affair that looks most like an early PS3-era game. Level design is simple in terms of architecture and sparse in the way of details or foliage is used, with low-resolution textures coating everything.

The games demonic enemies don’t fare much better, with details on their models only resolving when they’re literally in your face. At a distance, their texturing looks smudged and the models hazy, which is a shame as some of the designs aren’t bad. The game even sports a “Retro Mode” with selectable pixel ratios that, I suspect, are meant to pixelate the visuals even more for a truly classic retro aesthetic. All it seemed to do, for me at any rate, was make an already bad looking game even uglier. Worse still is the continuous screen-tearing that is present in every frame of the game, whether you’re in a arena packed with baddies or meandering down an empty corridor.

Are these visual issues a problem due to cross-generation porting? Is the game engine scaling poorly to the hardware, or was it done to keep the game moving at a crisp pace? I can’t say myself, but when you consider the PS4 has proven itself to be a bit of powerhouse during its lifespan, it makes the games visual presentation on the platform mind boggling. There’s nothing here that the machine couldn’t handle at better resolutions, detail, and with V-sync.

Level design and gameplay initially frustrates as well. As you’d expect from an arena shooter, Bloodhound often locks you into a room with waves of spawning enemies. Used carefully, it can be a tense affair, but in the game’s expanding world, Bloodhound overuses the design to the point where you can’t go more than a few steps without getting locked into a room, open area, or even just a small corridor with enemy spawns. By the end of the first level, it was already an unwelcome mechanic. Subsequent levels fare better though, as though the developers were learning as they went along. The mechanic doesn’t disappear – its Bloodhound‘s signature trick after all – but the pacing improves.

Returning to the core shooting mechanics, they’re quite solid if unspectacular. There’s a large arsenal or predictable weaponry to play with, though each weapon sports an alt-fire ability. Some weapons can be dual wielded for a short time, while others may have an attached flame thrower or a charged shot. The biggest problem with the gunplay is a lack of oomph and feedback from the arsenal. There’s no recoil to speak of, and most enemies don’t seem to register that they’ve been shot until they fall apart like paper dolls and play an agonised sound clip or two. Weapon effects are decent enough, but the visceral thrill of turning enemies into powder – the sense that you’re hitting them with enough firepower to level a city – just isn’t there.

But, for all the problems I’ve mentioned, Bloodhound does manage to eke out some fun – if you can endure the first level/world. That visceral thrill of pulping enemies may be absent, but the fast gunplay and oodles of things itching to die, does provide inherent entertainment. Can it stand with the big boys in the genre? No, but it works well enough in short bursts to provide moments of amusement. Oh, and dual wielding miniguns is never not fun!

Part of that fund comes from the rudimentary enemy A.I., with most enemies charging you in a blaze of glory. It keeps you on your circle-strafing toes and maximises the “switch-off-and-play” mentality. In that sense, Bloodhound does its job. It doesn’t hurt either that, despite the visual issues and copious screen tearing, that the game runs fast as well. I don’t recall ever hitting any moments of slowdown.

So Bloodhound may have a plethora of problems, but given its budget pricing, there’s a decent enough shooter lurking beneath the woeful presentation and poor, initial pacing. It just could have done with more time in the oven and some more playtesting.

Bloodhound was reviewed on PS4/5 using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC.