5/5 ★ – Atlas2102's review of Bloodborne.

Bloodborne was released nearly 7 years ago now and while it could use an upres and higher framerate the core game hasn't aged a day, still absolutely brilliant on almost all levels. Bloodborne reuses much of the Dark Souls formula while changing it to fit its new aesthetic and world. Estus beomes Blood Vials, Titanite becomes Blood Stones, magic is arcane, etc. So anyone familiar with the From Soft games will feel at home here. But despite treading such familiar ground the game sets itself apart brilliantly. You wake up confused in a bed of a hospital, a hunter on the night of the hunt. With little to go off you descend into a strange gothic world of werewolves, insane villagers, and plenty of animals to boot. Slowly but surely you begin to learn about the hunt. What it is, who you are in the scheme of it, but with every new thing you learn you find a shocking revelation as well. Most who have taken a look at the game or even heard of it in passing will know that the game is not all that it appears. Sure its creepy already but as you start to see the influence of HP Lovecraft and his works the game truly becomes next level in both story telling, world design, and character design. So how is the world design? Largely it follows in the footsteps of its predecessors in Dark Souls 1 and 2. Most paths will eventually dead end at a boss room, after which you'll warp back to the Hunters Dream and begin searching previous areas to discover new paths, either obfuscated or locked behind a door to which you now have the key. However, much like DS1 you'll find areas often loop back on themselves to create shortcuts or on occasions bring you back to an area you haven't passed through in 5 hours. In terms of visuals it just gets better and better. The architecture shifts in small ways from a large gothic towns to one filled with statues of monsters you can barely comprehend. Monsters themselves even begin appearing places you've been before but now your eyes are open. Every time leaving you surprised but giddy with excitement. All of this is amazing but how about the combat, you know that thing you'll be doing for 30 hours. Bloodborne does a wonderful job of setting itself apart from its predecessors in two ways, while taking a massive step back in one. Let's get the negative out of the way, blood vials. So what makes them so bad compared to Estus? In Dark Souls 1 Estus always replenished on death or on return to a bonfire assuring you would always have a base amount of them. You could also kindle to increase that in areas you deemed central or too difficult. It was a good way of allowing the player to control difficulty without having a normal or hard mode. Bloodborne takes a different approach by having you always carry 20 vials, if you have them. See vials don't replenish if you don't have them in stock. You can buy them or you can farm them, once you have 20 they'll go to storage. But if you have 0 in storage because you've been dying to a boss non stop, well now you need to grind to a halt and go farm for them. It's not terribly difficult to do but it is tedious and a distraction from whatever your current goal is, it can also potentially use up blood echoes (souls) which is also the currency for leveling. With that out of the way, back to the positives. Shields are now gone (minus 1 that is largely a joke) replaced with a firearm. The firearms can be used to do damage but are largely designed for parrying. A system which is far more forgiving than that of Dark Souls. Even mistimed parry's here can still knock an enemy off balance thereby nullifying their attack. But when you do hit the parry, which you'll need to learn, you can then walk up to an enemy and perform an extremely satisfying visceral attack. A high damage attack that can later also be used to replenish health. Speaking of replenishing health this game uses what they call the rally mechanic. The creators want you to play aggressively and they've done that with this mechanic. When you take damage your health isn't yet gone, you have a few seconds to attack the enemy and by doing damage you can replenish the health you're about to lose. Getting hit multiple times though will not allow you to get nearly as much back but it is a smart system that keeps you moving as opposed to turtling up and running to get healing off. So what was the other positive I mentioned about this game versus Dark Souls? Trick weapons. In Dark Souls you can find dozens, even hundreds of weapons all with varying degrees of differences and usefulness, often reusing animations. Bloodborne went the opposite way, they give you about a dozen weapons but these have two forms. An easy example is the Cane. In form one it functions much like a short sword for close combat but when you hit L1 it now functions as a whip, much more useful when fighting a group of enemies. Every single weapon has this capability of hitting L1 to completely change how a weapon works. You can also make this change mid attack to chain attacks together and do massive damage. It's a brilliant system that hasn't been revisited but makes every single weapon both fun, unique, and viable. There is so much more I want to say about this game both about the narrative as well as the boss design. However, I think it is better that players discover those secrets for themselves to truly understand why it is so brilliant. The game isn't perfect, almost no game is, but even still I have to give it 5 stars because it is so hard to put down even when you're struggling, absolutely captivating in all facets. If released in 2022 it could still go toe to toe with any game as potential GOTY. Here's hoping we see an updated version or even PC port one day so more players are able to experience it.