I have had my fair share of generic games on Xbox but Blood Waves is without a doubt one of the banalest games available. An unnamed Lara Croft clone that has to survive zombies in an empty room, themed after some kind of temple. I’m pretty sure that a guy being eaten by a horde of zombies has more happy thoughts than me playing this atrocious game, heck… I’m sure that a decapitated zombie head laying on the wastelands of the Sahara desert has more fun than me playing Blood Waves, I would prefer to be in his eyes and look at the sand, even if it irritates my eyes than looking at that incredible boring temple environment again. Read on why you should avoid this third-person shooter and tower defense mix, by any means necessary!
- Upgrading system: Upgrading your abilities and weapons was okayish at best, kinda similar with the upgrading system from The Evil Within. Improving the right skills will help with surviving the seemingly unstoppable and never ending zombie waves. This mechanic isn’t the saving grace so it is pretty pointless to buy the game for this.
- Visuals: At first sight, our nameless Lara Croft copycat and zombies look decent, textures are passable and look good enough when you compare it with some other indie-games. I did find the environments very empty and lifeless, it looks very generic and misses some much-needed variation.
- Wave after wave of boredom: 10 zombies, 20 zombies, 35 zombies, 50 zombies and so on. I understand that this genre is repetitive but Blood Waves really lacks more enemy types to keep things interested. You have your normal zombies, some bigger zombies, zombies that spit poison, electricity zombies and zombies that explode, while that sound enough on paper, this isn’t enough while playing. An option to solve this would have been more variation in the regular brain eaters but alas everyone looks the same.
- Building mechanics: With such a big focus on placing barricades and turrets I was absolutely flabbergasted by how awful this mechanic works. Not only does it affect the performance from the game by placing the maximum limit of barricades, placing the damn things feel like a drag too. It just isn’t responsive and strategically placing everything is much harder than it should be. Why the developer decided that you can not replace an object is beyond me too, it just isn’t user-friendly. Even more annoying is my following indent list item:
- Why can’t you jump over your barricades? I wanted to write this in caps but why isn’t it possible to jump over barricades??! This is such a big gameplay design flaw!
- Impractical aiming and hit feedback: Blood Waves is played in a third person view, I actually prefer this over the first person camera angle so my initial thought was a happy one, that quickly faded away, quicker than banana and stracciatella ice cream melts under the baking sun, when I noticed how poor the shooting and hit feedback works. All weapons have a different feel but the recoil is literally piss-poor and hit detection is almost none existent. This also means that both main gameplay mechanics aren’t well executed, the building is bad and the shooting is bad… bad + bad = … yeah, you guessed it.
- Animations: Laughable. Using your roll to dodge enemies is one of the worst ideas that you can do because it is actually slower than strafing right or left. In some moments you start to wonder that our bad Lara Croft look-a-like isn’t Pinocchio in Tomb Raider cosplay, it feels woody and looks out-dated.
Developer: Sometimes You Publisher: Sometimes You
Played on: Xbox One X Also available on PS4 – Switch and PC
Dae Jim bored himself for four hours killing zombie after zombie
Achievement difficulty for 1000 Gamerscore: Getting every upgrade and killing enough zombies will take some time, I honestly wonder who can play this game for so long.
Perfect for: Game designers that look for examples of how to not make a game.
Xbox Game Store link
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Gaming is a passion and I wanted to share my Xbox enthusiasm. That’s why I started LifeisXbox, to make sure gamers all around the world know what games they should buy or avoid. I would like to thank you for visiting my website. Your support is very welcome and I hope you stick around!
