Excess violence and showers of blood

By Peter Eley

Blood 2: The Chosen

Monolith

PC $109.95

MA15+

Be warned. This is a violent game where the prime aim is to blow everything in sight apart in a shower of blood.

An indication of its excess is that rather than restoring your shot-up body with medikits as in Quake and Unreal, you get life force from the hearts of your dismembered victims. And in place of high, medium and low-skill settings, you get a choice of genocide, homicide or suicide.

Shoot-'em-ups are violent by nature, but most have a degree of morality and a small redeeming factor is that usually the aim of the game is a rescue mission, or some other noble cause.

Not so in Blood 2. Like Mike Tyson shadow boxing, it's bad guy v bad guy, and woe betide man, woman, child or cute pet spaniel who gets in the way.

It's a sequel to Monolith's original Blood, a Doom/Quake clone that attracted a small cult following by its horror-film style.

The plot, if you can call it that, had an undead would-be serial killer named Caleb fighting the Cabal, a sect bent on world domination in the name of their god Tchernoborg.

Blood 2 kicks in 100 years later when the Cabal has become Cabalco, a mega-corporation trying to achieve the same end by using economic repression.

Caleb and his band of fellow psychopaths, the Chosen, have a thing about the Cabal's leader Gideon, and the point of the game - surprise, surprise - is to kill him.

Which makes it just another shoot-em-up, but with some interesting features.

One is the range of weapons - from a wickedly deadly stiletto knife to a singularity generator that creates a small black hole.

Along the way you'll get the chance to fry a few zombies with a napalm launcher.
If that's not enough, you get a few magic effects, too, such as a voodoo doll.

Press "fire" and pins are stuck in the doll at randomly selected places. Ouch!

The graphics run through Monolith's Lithtech system, used in Shogo, Mobile Armour Division. You really need a grunty machine with a Direct3D card to get the most out of it.

Even then, it can get clunky at times - there were some slow patches using a Pentium 2 with a 3D accelerator during the test. Part of this could be that for disk space reasons I chose to run the game from the CD - a full install needs more than 500mb on your hard drive.

My test version was the first retail release, and there have been patches released since. I found a few small bugs - such as bodies sticking through doors and objects passing through solid barriers.

But the graphics are impressive overall, if you can stand the sight of so much blood.

Required: Pentium 166, 32mb ram, and a 3D card for systems less than Pentium 233.

* Send your comments e-mail peter_eley@herald.co.nz