Captain Blood

{Captain Blood} is a simple and straightforward action game inspired by {God of War}. We've seen many of those in recent years, but what sets {Captain Blood} apart from, say, {Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden} and {Blades of Fire} - just to name a few - is that the game isn't inspired by the 2018 {God of War}, but the original PS2 classic from 2005.

There is a good reason for this. {Captain Blood} was originally supposed to be released first for Xbox, then for Xbox 360, but the project ran into trouble several times before it was completely abandoned when the publisher {Playlogic Entertainment} went bankrupt. Now {Captain Blood} has been revived, but unfortunately, you quickly learn that the story behind it is by far the most interesting thing about this game.

You play as the hardened pirate {Captain Blood}. He is British, but he looks more like a parody of an Italian heartthrob, which is actually very fitting, as the story is based on a pirate novel by Italian-born Rafael Sabatini from 1922.

However, the literary source material has not resulted in a particularly exciting story. {Captain Blood} is hired to rescue the British governor's daughter. He manages to do this halfway through the game, and now the same governor now asks him to attack the Spanish colony of Cartagena (in present-day Colombia). {Blood}, who must be the world's most authoritarian pirate, obeys orders and ransacks the city, after which the game ends.

To call it a story is almost an exaggeration. There is no character development, nuance, or conflict. There is not much coherence either. Villains appear out of the blue and disappear just as suddenly - in one and the same cutscene - and towards the end of the game, the bosses even stop shouting their obligatory battle cries during the fights.

Perhaps the developers were well aware that it was completely wrong, because by default the dialogue is turned down so low in relation to the other sound effects that the otherwise broad-chested sailors' deep voices are comically drowned out by seagull cries and lapping waves. Incidentally, it doesn't get much better when you actually adjust the sound mix, as no one has anything interesting to say. The only positive thing I can say about the sound is that the intense music gives it a very good {Pirates of the Caribbean} vibe.

To dwell a little more on the positive, the game's visuals are quite charming. The comically large characters and beautiful backgrounds are reminiscent of the WoW aesthetic that was so prevalent in the mid-2000s, and it still looks good. Unsurprisingly, the game also runs extremely smoothly on modern consoles, even on {Switch}.

Watching 2-3 minutes of gameplay, {Captain Blood} looks like a delightful time capsule from simpler times, which is also why I asked for a review copy. Unfortunately, it seems as if the game primarily consists of long-cured teething problems from the happy youth of action adventure games. This applies, for example, to the many Quick Time Events that always pop up at the worst possible moments, often in the middle of a cutscene when you've put down the controller.

As mentioned, {Captain Blood} is clearly inspired by {God of War}, and on the surface, the game captures much of what made Kratos' early adventures so thrilling. The fights are brutal, your attacks are fast and have a long range, and the numerous enemies fly comically into the air when they take damage. But {Captain Blood} lacks the two most important underlying ingredients, enemy and level design.

Let's take the enemies first. In {God of War}, the enemies were varied. They had different attack patterns, and you had to switch between your weapons and abilities to defeat them. In {Captain Blood}, you face weak pirates with little health, strong pirates with a lot of health, and annoying pirates with firearms. They all have to be defeated in pretty much the same way, and even though the game has many combination attacks, I quickly ended up just pressing the same input to perform the most effective attack.

The game contains about ten levels, but when you strip away the surroundings, they are almost identical in structure. The few puzzles and alternative routes you can find are so simple and obvious that they are hardly worth mentioning. The creative play with camera angles and non-linear level design that makes {God of War} and many other action games so vivid is completely absent.

{Captain Blood} can therefore never challenge you, only frustrate you. Particularly insulting are the many identical intermezzo levels, where you have to sink attacking schooners and landing boats attacking the captain's ship. Your cannons are wildly inaccurate, and once the enemies have boarded the ship, it all becomes a big mess, where the only way forward is to comically roll between the cannons and sink the remaining ships that way. A thoroughly hopeless design.

{Captain Blood} is, as you can probably tell, a pretty terrible game. Like its main character, {Captain Blood} is charming and nice on the surface, but after spending just five to ten minutes with it, you've already had enough. There is nothing of substance to be found here.

Nevertheless, the game could have had a lifeline to cling to if, for example, it had included extra material in the form of sketches, behind-the-scenes videos, or similar from the game's tumultuous development. That would at least be something. But no, the game is just served up as it was when it was dropped at the end of the 2000s. And that's not good. If {Captain Blood} had been released back then, it would have been incredibly poor. Now it's almost insulting, as it gives games of that era a bad reputation they don't deserve.