Bloodhound Review (PS5)

Bloodhound is an underbaked Doom clone that feels like a relic from the early 2000s. Although there are some nice touches it is far too rough and becomes far too repetitive to recommend.

Players take on the role of The Gatekeeper a shady-looking guy in a hood who steals a powerful artifact and a map to we assume more loot from a couple of occultists before riding off on his chopper made out of bones to go and look for more demonic loot, you’re tasked with gunning down every cultist and demon stupid enough to get in the way.

With a fairly large arsenal of weapons that, initially at least, have all the heft and impact of a leaking water pistol you wander around the woods trying to gun down a medley of monsters I’m sure I’ve seen for sale on the Unity store at some point.

There are demonic cherubs, vampy-looking guys in red trenchcoats, their shotgun-toting mates in brown trenchcoats, cultists that look like members of the KKK, and succubi sporting the blurriest boobs in the whole of video gaming wearing nothing but a g-string. They all look slightly out of place copy-pasted across most of the game, which thankfully can be blasted through in an afternoon.

It also features a collection of bosses that range from the baffling to the plain bizarre and include; a lizardman in a duster, a furious punk. and not Nemesis from Resident Evil for some reason.

None of them are particularly challenging, and like the rest of the baddies you’re up against they are thick as mince and will happily run straight into your bullets. This is made even easier once you have a few late-game weapons like the rocket launcher and railgun which make quick work of whatever you point them at.

There’s been some attempt to make the weapons at least a little fun, the crossbow nails monsters to walls, there is a chain-pull shotgun thing straight out of Doom (2016), and a rocket launcher covered with so many skulls you’d think it’d been stolen from a Chaos Space Marine.

The problem is there’s no tension in the trigger, no recoil when you fire, no loud explosion as the shell launches from the barrel, and no reaction from what you’ve hit except for an inevitable gib-filled death. It all just feels a little hollow.

All of the foes you face quickly blend together as just another thing that’s spawned behind you and shot you in the back or something you need to turn into paste to get past the umpteenth barrier the game has thrown in your way.

If it’s not barriers, it’s levers with skulls on which you need to pull to open gates, that are easy to miss, leading to you wandering around in circles, or having to find coloured keys to progress. What Does happen all the damn time though, is you pull a level, Monsters appear, you pick up a key, monsters appear, you enter a new area, and some more monsters appear – behind you.

For an apparent badass, if Bloodhound’s comic book opening is to be believed, our hooded protagonist sure gets ambushed a lot.

Thankfully there are some basic power-ups to help you win the day, but honestly, I barely bothered with them. There’s demon mode which powers up your guns for a brief period once you’ve collected 100 souls, a health boost that jacks your health up to 300, and the ability to slow down time, which is utterly useless as it also slows down your ability to fire.

The presentation is ok, you’ll fight your way through, woods, caverns, a farm, a huge church, dungeons, and a subway. It all looks like you would expect, but nothing stands out.

There’s a bad retro filter that just renders the game at a lower resolution if you like that sort of thing, which is useful because the blurriness detracts from the constant screen tearing.

The soundtrack is also so repetitive that it eventually becomes irritating, flicking between an electronic hum and a single repetitive metal riff whenever enemies are close, it’s a good way to know if you’ve still got something to shoot, or if another cherub has got itself stuck in the scenery somewhere (and they often do).

Final Thoughts

With a few adjustments and a little more time in the oven, Bloodhound could have been a fun if janky shooter, but everything feels so rote, so slapped together, so inconsistent, and ultimately bland that I can’t recommend you sniff this one out.