Blood 2: The Chosen Review

Multiplayer Levels

Thresh's comments in BLACK

Kenn's comments in BLUE

Attribute Rebuttal

Thresh:
While it sounds good in theory, I really have to say that more likely than not, one particular combination will stand above the rest. The FPS genre is pretty mature by now, and it's definitely reached a point where skills carry over fairly easily. You say the game can be slowed down, but we've both tried multiple settings, and ended up playing at or near max speed. That's not a coincidence, you know. In Shogo, Quake, Quake II, or any other game, speed is your GREATEST ally. Someone with good aim but bad strategy might take strength over speed, but a player with good strategy AND good aim will run circles all around him, taking pot shots and disappearing before the slower player has time to react. Nowadays, you can't be a great player if you're so lacking in one discipline. This is why almost all of the little quirks people know and take advantage of (strafe running, wall-running, strafe-jumping, etc.) have to do with getting that extra speed boost, no matter how small. Aim can only be so good, but if you can out-think your opponent and beat him to the punch, you'll kick his butt every time.

Hit fast and hard, and left reeling from the pain

Kenn:
Speaking of weapons, I found several guns to be quite overpowering. The Napalm cannon is basically a Quake 1 rocket launcher with massive radius damage. I don't think ANYONE is going to play multiplayer without this weapon as one of their staples. The Vulcan cannon is also extremely powerful, almost to the point of being instant death. Hold it on someone for over a second, and they simply melt away.

Multiplayer Maps

Kenn:
We'll see about that. Blood II ships with 14 multiplayer Bloodbath levels, ranging from desert dunes to indoor installations to ancient cityscapes and more. Several maps are geared towards Rocket Arena-styled combat, one of them being little more than a fenced off ring. They generally lack the ingenious creativity of Sin's levels, but like the original Quake, they're solid deathmatch maps that adhere to the cardinal rule of multiplayer (don't make your maps linear). Some maps also displayed some weird behavior, including the classic Lithtech "rockets don't explode on the ground" bug. On a minor note, several levels caused weapons to not be chrome mapped.

Thresh:
14 is a huge number of maps though. I generally found most of them quite standard, being hallway/corridor oriented, or large, open rooms with ledges for elevation. There's little of the variety found in the best Deathmatch levels of Quake, such as DM4's vertical-alignment and passion for lava. Another thing I noticed about the maps was a distinct lack of control elements. Depending on the setting, players can spawn in with various amounts of ammunition, and with armor scattered throughout the levels, there's nothing to guard, no goal to achieve. It means Bloodbath will remain nothing more than a huge cesspool free for all. Team/clan games would be very hard to pull off, unless of course it resorts to a pointless run-around FFA without killing certain players.

In all, multiplayer presented some new ideas and developments in gameplay, but for me, it ends up merely average on the "fun" scale. The weapons, while numerous, are often just variations of each other, but standouts such as the Orb's secondary attack or the singularity cannon inject some new life into standard multiplayer carnage.

Furious Bloodbaths