Home Page / xbox / B / Blood Wake / Review Listing / Review

The first time I first played Blood Wake at the demo station at my local gaming store, I was thoroughly unimpressed. My first impression was that of a very lacking “Twisted Metal”. It turned out to be a mistake to totally dismiss this game. Once I sat down and played through single player story mode and then battle mode with my friends, my outlook on Blood Wake had vastly changed. It was simple, yet fun. Easy to learn; and blowing your friends up is always fun – no matter what game you’re playing!

Blood Wake Story Mode introduces you as lieutenant Shao Kai, of the Northern League. The Northern League is one of several factions you’ll run across throughout the story. With a name like Shao Kai you’d think you were of Asian decent. Apparently not, as you sound like an egotistical American hotshot from a bad B-Movie. The story takes off when your own brother betrays you by destroying your ships and shipmates with a new secret weapon while on patrol for the Northern League. I guess you shouldn’t have picked on him when you were younger, eh? You are rescued by pirates known as the Shadow Clan (no relation to the Orcs!). The Shadow Clan is a faction led by Lord Ped Zeng (who could actually pass as Asian). Being as cliche as possible, you aren’t trusted at first and must “prove yourself’ to the Shadow Clan, of course. You work your way up the ranks of the Shadow Clan, with more cliche melodrama than you can spin your rudders at. Of course there’s this ONE guy in the clan who doesn’t entirely trust you and is always watching over your shoulder. Don’t forget about the all important love interest as well! You work through dozens of missions that span across several acts. These missions range from search and destroy to escort and infiltration. There are three difficulty levels to play each mission. The difficulty levels are Ensign, Captain and Admiral being the most difficult, respectively. Most of the missions are easily accomplished on the Ensign difficulty level, except for a few. Around mission 8 you run into what I call the “Hell Missions”. Every several missions or so, you’ll get one of these Hell Missions. Hell Missions can be almost impossible, even on the easiest difficulty levels. You’ll find yourself retrying missions over and over (for hours in some instances perhaps) trying to find a way to beat the mission. The first Hell Mission is a real shot in the nuts as all the previous mission were easily completed using speed and brute force tactics. After I encountered the first Hell Mission and got my sack handed to me over and over, I put the game down for three days straight. In the first Hell Mission, you must play it carefully – slow and very tactful. The Hell Missions only get worse from there. It may not be as bad for you as it was for me, so don’t let my negativity get you down. The Hell Missions ARE possible to beat – just very…. challenging.

The strength of Blood Wake is not the plot or story of single player mode, or the difficulty of the Hell Missions. The strengths are the intense action of the battle, tactical decisions and mindless fun of multi player Battle mode. In multi player Battle mode, you can play against human opponents, human and AI opponents, or AI opponents in various scenarios. More powerful boats and battle mode scenarios are unlocked by completing mission in story mode - like every other story mode based Xbox game, nothing new there. During the battle you can pick up power-ups, extra ammo and health crates from destroyed opponents and various random locations around the maps. Larger ships tend to drop more ammo and health crates when they are destroyed, as small ships will drop less. If the Speed boat can get behind the behemoth Torpedo boat, it can simply tail it while whittling it down with it’s machine guns. If the Torpedo boat gets the drop on the Speedboat, that’s usually all she wrote for the little guy. It’s a very simple system of checks and balances. Balance never really gets out of whack unless you play against that one guy who always uses the same boat and has mastered it’s capabilities. Different maps will give different advantages to different boats as well. Wide-open maps with nowhere to hide are usually deathtraps for the smaller, less armored boats. Stormy waters also affect the smaller boats with more severity. If you hit a nasty wave or the wake of a large boat, you’ll get tossed around like a rag doll, flipping your boat on end or even capsizing, leaving you vulnerable for several seconds. The downside to the large boats, as you probably guessed, is they don’t handle worth a crap compared to the smaller boats. Weapons range from heat sinking rockets to dumb fire torpedoes and mines. Explosions underneath the water cause awesome “wave crater” ripple effects, while a head on salvo will propel you over the explosion of your opponent just like in a movie. The physics when handling the boats across the chops and wakes FEEL realistic, however there are certain aspects of the physics that are more arcade-ish than realistic (such as being able to turn in mid air).

If Twisted Metal for the Xbox is what you seek, this isn’t quite it. Blood Wake is still an entertaining game, especially against your friends. The graphics are well done, and the game mechanics are very simplistic and well balanced. This is a good title to add to your collection if you are in need of fun death match type game to play against company.