It’s been a long time coming, but Captain Blood is finally releasing! After first being showcased back in 2010, before publishing disputes buried the game like old pirate treasure. But just like buried treasure, SNEG Ltd. dug up the game and made improvements to it to modernize it for today’s gamers, and finally released it! Thanks to SNEG for allowing me the opportunity to check out the game early and to see if the wait was worth it.
Captain Blood puts players in the boots of the titled main character, a fearsome pirate minding his own business in Port Royal, when the Spanish invade. Captain Blood and his crew are hired by a local magistrate whose daughter was kidnapped by pirates to find her and bring her back with the promise of getting a good word put in for them to become Privaters for the upcoming war between England and Spain.
Now. Onto the game itself! When it comes to the controls for Captain Blood, players will have no issue getting the hang of these old-school controls. When it comes to the game’s art, it’s awesome! The art reminds me of World of Warcraft; it’s cartoonish, but it fits with the game’s feel and flow. The sound of the game is a bit rough as there seems to be some issues with volume with the diolague during cutscenes but I’m overlooking it as I don’t know if these issues are because of the game being shelved and more than likley the audio was done in 2010 and sound recording has come a long way since then.
When it comes to gameplay, Captain Blood is at its core a hack-and-slash game, the kind of game I LOVE. You fight enemies and perform finishers on them (depending on the enemy type), and with every defeated enemy, you get gold that goes towards buying upgrades such as combos, finishers, and equipment upgrades. If you explore the levels, you may find treasure chests loaded with coins and health.
Overall, Captain Blood was a fun play and felt nostalgic for me with how it looked, sounded, and played like some of the games I loved playing back in the early 2000s. I can’t go too hard on any of the negative aspects of the game as there’s really nothing game-breaking, but it shows that the game was lost to time at some point, which won’t affect the overall score much. With the gameplay, art, and controls, the game scores high, but some of the repetitive nature of combat, volume issues, and long ship battles affect the score slightly negatively. On my scale of 1-10, Captain Blood is an 8.5/10
Captain Blood comes out May 6th for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
