Blood Alloy: Reborn

Sometimes all we need in life is love and mindless fun. Fun that could be picking flowers from a lovely meadow or engaging in epic arena-style combat that’s fast paced, brutal and filled with cool sci-fi effects. It’s great when a game offers a fun experience that requires little effort to casually play, but can also be vastly rewarding once you immerse yourself and develop the skills required to master it. Which sound like an experience that’s both for the hardcore and causal gamer.

Blood Alloy Reborn is set to be that game, offering players an engrossing arena-style experience that infuses elements of stylish, combo-based combat and character building. You’ll take control of a cyborg solider named Nia Rhys who’ll battle hordes of various mechanised NPCs to obtain points and to upgrade their weapons and abilities in order to progress further. It’s as simple as that. There’s no story mode as such, but rather one mode that is simply a hoard mode like you’ve seen in Gears of War or Call of Duty.
It may seem like a small package but from what I’ve learned from these types of games, if it has captivating gameplay elements, it’ll keep you coming back for more. So, does it?

The mechanics are solid and the core gameplay elements are easy to immerse yourself into, whether you’re used to games like these or prefer something more slowly in pace. It does require some time to adjust and grasp the controls but in no time you’ll get a hang of the jumps, slides and dodges which become highly important for survival. Killing NPCs will earn points and players will rank up and acquire new weapons, perks and special attacks that will help them progress further. As said, the core mechanics are solid and the game is highly energetic, helped by a great soundtrack, that sounds as though it was composed by Kavinsky, and retro visuals which look aesthetically pleasing.

My issues with the game, however, stem from its highly repetitive nature and extremely grinding feel. The game pushes players through a tedious gameplay cycle in order to level up and progression goes to snail’s pace within a blink of an eye. Now, you’ll start off with a single level and the later two missions will unlock only after reaching certain ranks. The second mission, for example, is open when the player reaches rank 7, which sounds simple when the game makes is fairly quick and joyful to progress through up to rank 6. Then it slows down a hell of a lot. I saw straight away what the game was doing and soon knew this would become a painfully slow experience. The developers knew the amount of content was miniscule and in order to keep players invested, they had to slow down progression.

Not to mention the game can be insanely difficult and overwhelming without any steady difficulty increase, preferring to throw everything at you in one huge spike. Without any conventional health pickups, useful perks and bare minimum of equipment for the first 7 ranks, you’ll die a lot and things soon become tiring as it repeats without any real dynamic events or changes in pacing.
See, hoard modes work by structure and are most effective and enjoyable with good pacing, rewards and dynamic changes to keep things interesting. Blood Alloy has the right elements but lacks certain important factors that instead make it fairly tiresome and quick to put down. There are only three missions, a very small selection of weapons and when you rank up the thing you unlock most often is a new song. How does this factor into the game’s design or, better yet, as a reward that actually helps me in the game? Shouldn’t that be an extra or just already unlocked?

Without any customisation features, anything truly rewarding to offer and the lack of content makes Blood Alloy sadly a short-lived affair. It’s fun for causal instances but sadly it grinds way too early and forces you to invest by making progression slow and difficult. When I mentioned a game both for hardcore and causal gamers that’s great, this is not one of them. It would have been a great starting point, but it feels as though the developers just stopped half way through production and decided to increase the grinding nature to make progression slow and fuller.

+ Great aesthetics
+ Intense and stylish action
- Progression grinds after rank 6
- No structure to difficulty / needless difficulty spikes
- Highly repetitive

A Steam key for Blood Alloy: Reborn was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review