Bloodshed

Could be great someday but it isn't really today and likely won't be which sucks. The themeing the premise and the idea were on point but the execution, at the moment, is just not there. It definitely could be there though, if it weren't abandoned by the dev that is. Bloodshed tries to blend elements of survivorlikes with elements of boomer shooters and to me it fails at both at the same time, trying to gleam gameplay mechanics from both but ultimately fails to connect these two genres in any meaningful way. I'll elaborate. TLDR, I would not recommend this game if you're looking for a survivorlike boomer shooter type game. I feel like there are better games in that genre that you'd get a better experience from and urge you to keep looking. Bloodshed isn't quite a survivorlike, as you never really get to the point where YOU are the bullet hell. The weapons you get never merge/blend/work together. You'll find that you'll really only choose and use one weapon throughout any stage. You're heavily incentivized to keep upgrading that weapon until you can't any more. There is no point in using any other weapons when you get there, as, that just equates to lost damage output. For instance, why would I ever use my lv1 throwing stars when I have a beefed up minigun? Why even give you the option to have multiple weapons at this point if it serves just as decoration after the midway point of any stage? Any other survivorlike worth its skin will give you the opportunity to merge, or combine your weapons together to 1. free up the weapon slot 2. give you more power and speed up the game 3. actually have a use for all the weapons in the game. The weapon & magic system in Bloodshed is very shallow with very boring number go up upgrades. Speaking of boring number go up upgrades, the meta-progression is bad, grindy, painfully slow and largely unrewarding and gives you very unmeaningful upgrades. The unlockable characters are just as forgettable as melee is (which it is INCREDIBLY bad) This game runs impressively poorly on hardware that should be more than capable of handling a doom-like survivor-like wannabe. Each stage acts as an arena that locks you into playing sometimes 30minutes sometimes 15 minutes sometimes 5 minutes straight and its a really bad sign when you're just watching and waiting for that number to go down to 0 so that you can be done with the stage. That upgrade slot machine mechanic while cool the first 4 times, gets incredibly old as you cannot skip it, it interrupts the *meager* gameplay loop, and it takes 15 seconds for you to pull up the slot machine pull the wheel watch all the slots hit their icons and wooo I just got money again for the 1000th time! Yea, Bloodshed sucks donkey doodoo dung definitely don't dare drop dollars on this downright dismal disaster, save your ducats, make like diarrhea and dash far away from this game. IMO its worse than an outright bad game. This is a game that you can see the potential in squandered

Killing Baal and Moloch's followers (Israelis) simulator. 10/10

Two chapters have art on the campaign screen. The rest of that bar holds empty card slots where more episodes were supposed to go, and the last balance patch shipped in July 2025. Bloodshed shoots well enough that the empty slots hurt. The pitch is a 1994 shooter welded to the Vampire Survivors level-up loop: pick one of seven heroes, drop into a walled slab of gothic architecture, and turn cultists into paste while a perk screen interrupts you every half minute. The combination holds for six hours. Around hour eight it runs out of things to show you, and I cannot recommend it at the asking price. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] The shooting is the reason to be here. Guns land with weight, the sound design has bite, and the strafe-jump movement builds speed like an old Quake mod with the difficulty sanded off, so you can slide through a wall of undead without clipping a single hitbox. A toggle switches between auto-fire and manual aim. That sounds like a footnote and it changes how heroes play: the wand mage wants auto-fire so you can spend your attention on kiting, and the shotgun builds want you picking targets. The arenas hold up too. Blue braziers and obelisks respawn as loot faucets, hidden items unlock bonus missions, and each map stays small enough to memorize while leaving room to run laps around a boss. Enemy and level design lift from Doom and Blood without apology, and the sprites-in-3D presentation earns the comparison. Then you notice the arsenal is decoration. Upgrade points come in at a trickle that cannot feed two guns, so a run collapses into picking one and dumping everything into it until the level 8 cap. Weapons stay separate. Nothing merges, nothing evolves, and a level 6 minigun makes the throwing stars in your other slot a rounding error. Melee is worse than decoration. Bosses outrange it, exploding enemies detonate in your face without granting the immunity a sword swing needs, and a melee-only build can walk a thirty-minute run into a boss it cannot kill. Spells sit in the same bucket with one exception that breaks the game in half: the healing patch you drop on the ground outheals anything the horde brings. Unlock it and the difficulty curve flattens for the rest of the campaign. Keep moving, stand in your own puddle, win. The first two hours are tight. They do not survive contact with that upgrade. Outside the runs, gems buy permanent upgrades at prices that double each rank, starting at 200. The five-minute opening mission pays about thirty gems. The twenty-minute mission pays around four hundred, quitting early pays nothing, and mission two becomes a wall for anyone who wanted to dip a toe in first. Rerolls and revives are consumables, so the tools that fix a bad item pool disappear after one use, and no option exists to banish a weapon from the pool for good. I ran ten hours without the AK appearing on a level-up screen once. The slot machine that hands out mission rewards takes fifteen seconds and cannot be skipped, and by the tenth pull you are watching a wheel instead of playing a game. The anti-camping mechanic is awful, and it is the worst decision in the game. Hold a position too long and a tent icon fills at the top of the screen, then a roaming hazard spawns and chases you off the spot with punishing damage. That happens in a horde shooter, a genre built on choosing your ground. Fortifying a chokepoint with bear traps and letting a thousand enemies funnel into it is a valid answer to a thousand enemies, and the developer chose to kill you for it to protect one approved movement pattern. Delete the tent and this becomes a better game the same afternoon. [h2]Story and voice[/h2] The camp horror framing works. Blood cults, demon iconography and a cast that looks pulled off an Evil Dead poster carry more personality than the systems underneath them, and the lore text has more thought in it than the genre asks for. The voice lines split the difference between charming and grating. Heroes bark one-liners on a short rotation, the humor leans edgelord, and the old man exists to make jokes about being old. Ten hours in, the rotation wears through. I stopped short of muting it. [h2]Verdict[/h2] Thumbs down, and it took me a while to land there. Bloodshed is a good six-hour game wearing the skeleton of a twenty-hour one. The shooting holds up, the art holds up, and the systems run out of ideas about the time chapter two ends. At $12.99 you are paying full price for a campaign bar with holes in it, a difficulty curve that one spell erases, and a hazard that punishes you for playing well. The last balance pass was version 1.0.14 in July 2025. Two things landed after it: a Unity security patch in October 2025 and a set of Steam trading cards in November. Thirteen months of silence follow, so none of this improves from here. The carve-out is the sale price. It drops to $3 or $4, and at four dollars those eight hours of shooting are worth having. Buy it that cheap or skip it. [h2]Pros[/h2] [list] [*] Gunplay with real impact, and strafe-jump movement that stays easy to learn [*] Auto-fire and manual aim as a toggle, switchable to suit each hero [*] Arenas worth exploring, with hidden items that unlock bonus missions [*] Enemy and level design lifted from Doom and Blood, and it looks the part [*] Ends before it repeats itself, if you stop after chapter two [*] Achievements reachable in a single weekend rather than a hundred hours [*] Steam Deck Verified, with full controller support [/list] [h2]Cons[/h2] [list] [*] One weapon per run, because splitting points across two leaves both weak, and nothing merges or evolves [*] Melee is a trap that can dead-end a thirty-minute run against a boss [*] The ground-heal spell erases the difficulty curve for the rest of the campaign [*] Two chapters and visible empty slots for episodes that never shipped, with no balance patch since July 2025 [*] Meta upgrade costs double per rank, rerolls and revives burn on use, and the reward slot machine is a fifteen-second wall you cannot skip [*] 50 FPS at 4K on an RTX 3070 for a game made of sprites [*] An awful anti-camping hazard that punishes you for holding ground in a horde shooter [/list] [h2]Who this is for[/h2] [list] [*] Boomer shooter players who want a perk screen between kills [*] Anyone who liked Vampire Hunters and wants sharper guns wrapped around less game [*] Bargain-bin buyers at $3 or $4 who want eight hours and no more [*] Steam Deck owners hunting a controller-friendly horde shooter for short bursts [/list] [h2]Who should skip[/h2] [list] [*] Survivors-likes players who show up for build synergies and weapon evolutions [*] Anyone paying the $12.99 asking price, since the campaign bar will not fill in [*] Players on modest hardware, since the performance will not get patched [*] Anyone who needs co-op [/list]

The game has the potential to be decent. However, it fails to reach that potential. I love many aspects of this game, the art, character and map designs, and even its concept. Everything falls apart because of its balancing, upgrading, and spell systems. First, the option to use multiple guns is ONLY for one's own satisfaction, not out of necessity. For example, you may wanna play some Samurai b1tch but wanna use other guns, and that's possible. This is the only reason you may want to waste your upgrade points on selecting other guns instead of sticking with what you already have. Otherwise, spending upgrade points on multiple guns will just make everything worse. Additionally, upgrading weapons is really about upgrading, not modifying. So, you can just pick one weapon and dump everything into it without a second thought, because why not? It's obviously going to make it better. Most of the spells are useless (except for the healing spell on the ground, which is OP AF, turning the game from challenging into absurdly boring). By useless, I mean you can technically complete the entire game using just one single weapon without anything else. So, using spells is, again, just for one's own satisfaction, not necessity. Forget about melee weapons and character spells. I will just try to forget their existence and not discuss them here, as they are... Well, I expected the game to have more maps. Honestly, the UI makes it seem like there must be more maps (levels) than what you actually see. It even has space prepared for them. So, I assume it leaves that space for more DLC(?) or future updates, IDK. But right now, it just seems abandoned.

Shakin' my head. Too many people saying this game reminds them of DooM (or Quake. How.) when this game is obviously inspired by Blood (1997). The second character you get is a legally distinct Caleb. Maybe a little Hexen/Heretic. Maybe a little Diablo. I bought this game for $3.24. At that price, the game is a steal. It's not very deep strategically, but this entire genre isn't. It was made for people stoned out of their gourd to sit on their couch and press directional buttons while gambling. Not saying that as a negative, Sometimes I want a game like that. It has good Goldsrc/Quake 1 style bunnyhopping and every character has a unique ability that is usually related to movement to mix it up a little. The maps are good and have a nice gothic aesthetic, movement is fluid and fun, shooting is fine and gibbing creatures is satisfying. I do wish the game had some more content but what's there is Fine. If the game looks interesting to you, I recommend giving it a try.

No fun progression. No interesting synergies with any weapons ( you just use 1 weapon during a whole run cuz you dont want to spend points on any other weapons). Boring Character abbilities. The healing on the ground is OP and ruins the run by trivializing the whole game. See no reason to continue playing, it just aint fun.

Progression sucks, using more than 1 gun is bad most of the time, there are no real builds or synergies, so close being a good game but its not.

Bloodshed looks great in screenshots and feels decent for the first hour, but the systems underneath it fall apart fast, and the developer has clearly moved on. The last update was on 4 October 2025. Whatever is broken now is what you're buying, so don't go in expecting fixes. What actually killed it for me: You realistically use one weapon per run. Upgrade points are scarce enough that spreading them across a second gun just makes both of them bad. So the "extensive arsenal" collapses into "pick one thing, dump everything into it, repeat next run." No builds, no synergies, no decisions. The game punishes you for staying in one place. Hold a position for too long and it starts pushing you out with a moving hazard. Why? If I want to fortify a corner and let the horde come to me, that's a valid way to play a horde shooter. Let people play how they want instead of enforcing one approved movement pattern. Character abilities are forgettable. None of them changed how I played; they're stat bumps with a coat of paint. Spells are irrelevant next to your gun. Your weapon does the work, the spells chip in a rounding error. They may as well not be in the game. Melee is dead weight. Against ranged enemies that swarm you, there is no situation where a melee weapon beats just shooting. Anything invested there is wasted. The weapon designs have zero imagination. A pistol, then two pistols, then a faster pistol, then a shotgun, then a different shotgun. Nothing in the arsenal does anything mechanically interesting. There aren't many levels. You see most of what the game has to show you very quickly, and then it's the same arenas over and over. Optimization is bad. I get around 50 FPS at 4K on an RTX 3070 — in a game with deliberately retro, low-fidelity visuals. I had to drop to 1440p to get a comfortable framerate. There's no excuse for a game that looks like this to run like that on that hardware. There is a decent shooter buried in here somewhere — the shooting itself feels fine, and the aesthetic works. But the progression, the build variety, and the restrictions on how you're allowed to play all drag it down, and with the game abandoned since autumn of 2025, none of it is getting better. Wait for a deep sale at most, or just play something else in the genre.