Blood Spear

[h1][b]Recommended:[/b] Blood Spear[/h1] As far as free games on Steam go, the quality, as one might expect, varies quite a bit. For every Warframe or Where Winds Meet, there are a thousand asset flips, "free" games riddled with ads, and other assorted shovelware. In this vast array of games, [b]Blood Spear[/b] stands somewhere in the middle. As a graduation project, it's not really a full-fledged game, but it's also far from something slapped together in an afternoon. But the eternal question remains - is it any good? In Blood Spear you, quite appropriately, play as a magical sentient spear. Inhabited by the spirit of some ancient powerful entity, the spear possesses the body of a mortally wounded warrior, eager to break out of its underground prison and feast on blood once again. As our spear-warrior combo, you'll use a mix of ranged combat and AOE attacks to fight enemies and clear your way to the surface. Even though there are only a handful of enemies (guys, guys with shields, floating eyes, and poisonous mushrooms), I think this is perfectly fine in the context of this game, and the whole thing is capped off with an interesting boss fight. The environments of the nameless world you're traversing are appropriately dark and moody, being clearly inspired by Soulsborne games. The character models are quite sparse, featuring some pretty janky animation, but this makes sense considering most of it was done by hand rather than pulled from an asset pack. The sound and voice acting are serviceable and do a lot to make the experience more immersive. All in all, picking up Blood Spear feels very much like playing a demo you found on one of those CDs you'd get bundled with old PC gaming magazines. Except, in this case, it's a demo for a game that never was. Still, the team behind it did a tremendous job considering their relatively low level of experience and all the constraints that come with it being a graduation project. If you have 30-60 minutes to spare, you should absolutely give it a go.