Captain Blood Review (KDD!^putler kaputt 26/93)
The game was in development hell for 20 years. It started in 2003 and was released in 2025. But unlike Duke Nukem Forever or Defender's Quest 2 it wasn't slapped together in the last two years. The game was basically finished and sent to the publisher in 2010, but it was never released. The good guys at SNEG doing human's work freed it from copyright limbo, ported it to all the modern systems and translated it to many languages.
This is a slasher game, of the western kind. Devil May Cry is built around puzzles, patterns, tight combos, acquisition of new weapons and their upgrades. Western slashers are all about light and heavy attacks, primitive meaningless combos, and repetitive takedowns, and of course QTE. The game does feel like it was done then and there. It feels like a budget release, yet as a eurasian game it has several its own mechanics you never expect from faceless western games, and a number of minor shippable bugs.
The combat is very loose. While i don't like mandatory target lock, this game doesn't have any. Not manual target lock, not contextual. Yet with fixed camera and not exactly absolute controls it doesn't play like a 3rd person action game either. You often get stunlocked and can do nothing about that, not block, not evade, not counter-attack, not riposte. Just relax your buns, let it happen, and wait until it's over. The QTE suck as always, they made cool cutscenes, but no one can see them because they are frozen looking at the same spot waiting for QTE to appear. But at least the game saves you right before a QTE, so no need to replay the entire level.
The easy difficulty is overtuned, yet it's not consistent. The last boss couldn't kill me, my HP was stuck at 50%. Yet the first boss was wiping the floor with my face. Even with the regenerative HP really not wanting to leave that 50% mark, big crowds could easily kill me. And then the fort assault mission releases a giant hordes of the strongest enemies at you, and i have no strategy how to survive that.
The art-style is awesome. The weakest dude has pecks bigger than girls' tits in this game. Everything is very stylized, and the game features cartoony dismemberment.
In it's essence it's a mediocre game slasher game of the western style. But it has pirates setting, rule of cool, good art-style, some interesting unnecessary mechanics, and its history. Now we just need for SNEG to release Vseslav Charodey.