Blood Alloy: Reborn Review (PC)

Blood Alloy: Reborn is a 2D arcade shooter where you're thrown into one of three areas and are left to shoot and slash your way through countless robots in order to achieve high combos and high scores; sounds like fun, and it was fun for the first ten minutes, but every minute after that was tedious, repetitive, and anything but fun. The problem is, Blood Alloy: Reborn is rather empty and it only took me ten minutes to feel like I had experienced everything the game has to offer and, while the game is all about high scores, there are no online leaderboards, so I was only competing with myself and that's not very compelling.

As I mentioned previously, there are only three areas in the game and the two I played in didn't feel different enough to make me pick one over the other, feeling different only in terms of how they look; however, the visuals are only okay, so I didn't care if I was playing in a factory of a jungle because they shared similar [enough] layouts and average visuals. When I first unlocked the jungle I was hoping it would force me to play in a completely different way, but that didn't happen and I highly doubt the city--which is the third and final area--will be any different--I didn't unlock the city because that would have required hours of time I'd rather spend in just about any other game right now.

I could overlook the lack of variety if Blood Alloy: Reborn played well, but the controls--I was using an Xbox One controller--felt loose an inaccurate, not always registering my button presses and, in a fast-paced game requiring precision, that's not good. Even when I wasn't having issues with the controller input, I still wasn't having much fun because there just wasn't much to do or see after the first ten minutes. Blood Alloy: Reborn wants the player to replay the game over and over and over again to reach new high scores, unlock new, boring weapons, and slowly gain more XP, but it's hard to stick with the game when the fundamental gameplay isn't that much fun and no online leaderboards exist. Blood Alloy: Reborn may get better with age as it's patched and new content is added, but right now the game doesn't feel fully-featured enough to recommend.

Blood Alloy: Reborn (Steam [Windows] - $12.99)