izigame.me

Stunlocked: The Game
Okay, thay might be unfair, first I do want to congratulate the team for ressurrecting a game from 2004 in 2025, every game deserves to make the light of day no matter how good or bad and it's up for each individual player to figure out if it's good or bad on their own, subjective opinions and all that.
And I really though Captain Blood was for me, I love games from that era, and a Hack n Slash inspired by the original God of War games sounds like a fun time, I expected a simple game inferior to GoW of course, and I got a simple game, there are only XXXX (light attack) and YYYY (heavy attack) combos and you have to unlock any mixture of them from the upgrade shop which makes a simple game even simpler at the start, but what caught my attention was the ability to pick up and throw barrels and crates at enemies, the ability to buy an upgrade that allows you to steal your enemies weapons when you execute them and the chests spread around the game containing health that you can use in a pinch, all of this reminded of the simple but still fun heat of the moment resource management of arcade beat em ups, it's fun and perhaps the game would be better if the upgrades were just attack increase and health increase and let all of the combos from the get go so it would be less monotonous.
Unfortunately the game suffers from a lot of problems, there is a parry but it is pathetic, it feels bad to use and it's even hard to tell when you managed one so you can follow with a counter attack, there is a rage mode but it is pathetically short and due to long winded executions animations you have to use on 90% of enemies you can usually only kill one heavy enemy before it expires, with no ability to upgrade it, honestly, the beat em up elements I mentioned earlier are the only fun to manage part of the games. And of course, enemy groups are designed in a way that different enemy types love to stunlock you by beginning their attack as soon as the other enemies ended theirs or spamming grenades/bullets to keep essentially not playing for extended periods of time, the game's idea of a difficulty curve is to spam bigger and bigger enemy groups with bigger and bigger health pools and higher and higher stunlock potential, it's annoying and bad.
So why did I play until the end? Because when I started getting bored the game introduced a grenade throwing enemy that Captain Blood can remove their heads off with his bare hands and then throw them like a human grenade, because there's a cutscene in which Captain Blood pushes back against a bullet that hits his sword as if the bullet is being pushed onto him like a sword, basically, because it is filled with ridiculous, awesome shit, 2000's style. It's jank, but it's fun enough to push you through.
Unfortunately though, the game suffers from severe save issues, at one point in the game I thought I had found a bug because a combo I bought was no longer working, only to find out the combo locked itself again in the shop window, which is super bad given every playthough has a limited amount of gold in it, but to make matters worse once you reach the Siege of Cartagena chapter, the game refused to save at all, every checkpoint returning a "Save Failed" message so you basically have to finish the rest of the game in one go once you hit that. Funny bugs and wacky ragdolls I can take, but a game releasing with severe save bugs that result in lost progression, sometimes lost progression that CAN'T be gotten back since the game RELOCKS upgrades so you just gotta spend more money to get it again, that's ridiculous, no product should be sold in that state, this is the rare but sadly true OBJECTIVELY BAD. As a side note I also couldn't buy the last pistol upgrade AND the game unlocked an achivement for purchasing all upgrades even though I hadn't when I hit the final chapter, just take it back to the workshop boys, this shit is messy.