YMMV / Blood (1997)

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Shial, despite being responsible for the death of Gabriel(la), is one of the game's easiest bosses. She's little more than a Mook Maker with no other offense, whose mooks aren't that strong and whose health isn't that high. Even looking at her, you might be surprised to hear she's a boss; she's actually smaller than most of the normal enemies. It's especially blatant because you fight a Stone Gargoyle at the end of the previous level, an enemy who actually would have worked as a boss.
  • Tchernobog himself has only half the health of Cerberus, and there's a ton of health and powerups in his boss room. It's not unheard of for him to die before he even gets out of his room.
• Awesome Music: One reason Blood is praised is for its subtly comedic dark atmosphere, and both versions of the soundtrack do it justice: to simplify, once the game installed, you could play it without the CD in the player, and depending on its presence, absence, or use of the -nocd command-line option, you could either hear an already good MIDI soundtrack in the latter situation or a more fleshed-out CD soundtrack in the former. Both are available in the Fresh Supply port.
• Awesome Video Game Levels:
  • "Phantom Express" is a well done level in a train there things are even more tight and hectic than usual whilst on a fast moving vehicle.
  • "Dark Carnival" is probably the most iconic level in the first episode, a truly twisted Amusement Park of Doom with unique areas like a freakshow, a tightrope, and even playable sideshows.
  • "The Overlooked Hotel" is regarded as a high point of the second episode, with its bountiful secrets, neat references, and expansive, nonlinear design.
• Breather Level: The second episode is a lot easier than the first one. It has a larger variety of weapons, including the Voodoo Doll, and its final boss, Shial, is just a big spider that can only spawn lesser ones and cannot attack on her own, and is nothing comparing to the first episode's Cheogh the Stone Gargoyle, which does heavy damage and is unbelievably hard to kill with the first six weapons. Sure, there are Stone Gargoyles in episode 2, but the Voodoo Doll chews them up and spits them out. In turn, the episode has a breather level, namely Level 5 (The Haunting), which is long but quite easy; unlike the level before, it doesn't feature any kind of Cultist or (in the case of the secret level) Stone Gargoyles.
• Cheese Strategy: The Stone Gargoyle is an incredibly dangerous opponent, thanks to its high health and damage... unless you crouch. For some reason, absolutely none of the Gargoyle's attacks can hit a crouching opponent.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Since the games' main selling point is to be so over-the-top violent and dark, besides being not serious at all about anything including itself, it often becomes amusing instead of terrifying.
• Cult Classic: It didn't have nearly as much saturation as Duke Nukem 3D or Shadow Warrior got on the mainstream audience (it was the first of the three to get a released sequel, though Duke remained at least adjacent to the public consciousness for fifteen years, and Shadow Warrior's 2013 reboot and 2016 sequel saw far more fanfare and acclaim than Blood II), but the game is beloved thanks to its unique features like destructible environments and dark but humorous tone, as well as looking great for its time.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Hellhounds and Fire Pods, enemies that can set you on fire for a lot of damage if there's no water nearby. Hellhounds are particularly nasty as they're very fast and, on higher difficulties, almost always encountered in packs of at least three.
  • All of the Cabal's human forces. All of them. The regular brown-robed Cultists fire their shotguns fast with no need to reload like Caleb, and frequently toss sticks of TNT (or more powerful bundles of it past Lightly Broiled difficulty). Black-robed Fanatics spam their Tommy Gun nonstop until you either hit them or get out of their line of sight, and in earlier builds can throw TNT just like Cultists. The blue-robed Zealot is mostly the same, only more damaging and less accurate. And finally, the green-robed Acolytes don't shoot, but make up for that by spamming TNT like there's no tomorrow. Not taking any of these guys out very fast or from too far for them to attack effectively means a struggle even on "Lightly Broiled", and a death sentence on "Extra Crispy".
  • Gill Beasts are a real threat, given their downright ludicrous speed (Caleb isn't exactly slow himself, but the Gill Beast can close the distance in about one second) and their melee focus making the old shotgun a risky pick, and it's not at all helped by the fact that they're typically fought underwater. Luring them out of the water cuts their speed to a crawl and leaves them as sitting ducks, but this isn't always feasible.
  • While they don't exactly fall under this trope (except perhaps for the mothers, in E3 and beyond), it's probably worth noting that some enemies are literal demonic spiders.
• Fanon:
  • Before it was clarified as a communication error between the dev team and cinematics team, it was assumed by a few fans that Caleb was bald in the first game due to his hat falling off in the intro, and let his hair grow out for the sequel.
  • While Post Mortem doesn't have much of a story, the manual referring to the Priests as "Chosen in training" gave rise to the idea that Caleb is hunting them down for insulting the memory of his companions.
• Game-Breaker: The Napalm Launcher is a hideously overpowered piece of equipment. It's the game's analogue to the rocket launcher, except it spreads fire to everything struck in its area of effect in addition to exploding with the force of a dynamite stick. If anything survives being struck by the initial blast, they'll be set on fire shortly thereafter, which makes it a strong tool for clearing rooms in later Episodes. It also has a destructive alternate fire that launches what can only be described as a bouncy cluster napalm grenade, which is even more powerful than the base shot. While the alternate fire costs a justifiable twelve shots, the normal fire costs only one napalm ammo per shot, making it a very cost-effective weapon. All in all, the Napalm Launcher is the best weapon in the game next to the Tesla Cannon and can carry you extremely far by itself.
• Goddamned Bats: The appropriately-named "nuisance enemies", which include bats, rats, spiders, Choking Hands and mini-Calebs, weak but small and fast enemies that don't deal much damage, rely on creepy-crawling in small crevices and confined spaces to surprise Caleb, and can be disposed of with impunity with enough skill. The bats themselves, though hostile, very rarely count since they don't swoop down to attack - the most they can do is get auto-aimed by a Napalm Launcher shot, which at best wastes one round of preciously rare ammo and at worst makes it explode in your face. Thankfully, their AI pathfinding means they easily get stuck in corners off the beaten path, so it doesn't happen often. However, the Hands can become Demonic Spiders if you have only the retail version without patches thanks to a Game-Breaking Bug where you can't get them off you at all.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Axe Zombies and any variety of Cultist that leave behind a Life Essence when killed will leave another if their (already dead) bodies are gibbed^note if they can be gibbed instead of just getting knocked back a little – as a rule of thumb, if they're killed with bullets, the Tesla Cannon or melee, their corpses can be gibbed. Another bug is that, if an enemy is launched in the air when it's killed, its corpse will gib when it lands. And the Sawed-Off Shotgun's Secondary Fire has more than enough knockback to send both cultists and axe zombies flying. It doesn't have the same sheer visceral fun of launching a bundle of TNT at an unaware group of zombies and watching the chunks fly, but attracting their attention and air-juggling them with the scattergun leaves you with more health pickups, which may come in as handy or even necessary.
  • The "flame guy" bug, as noted for Dead Character Walking. The mook will become a Collision Damage fireball that won't hurt you if you don't make a move towards it, and can only be harmed by Splash Damage or with another flare, whereas it will die instantly.
  • The Merry-Go-Pukey in E1M4: Dark Carnival will spawn gibs if it's attacked. That includes being gently poked with the pitchfork. An explosion will make it spout a literal shower of body parts.
  • You can No-Sell the Bloated Butcher's cleaver throw just by crouching (the projectile still hits, oddly enough, as the smoke puff on contact shows, but doesn't cause any damage). His puke ball is negated the same way, but at least it visibly flies right over Caleb's head when he's crouched.
  • Crouching also completely no-sells the Stone Gargoyle - he can't hit you even with close ranged attacks. This turns any battle with them into total walks in the park, where you can subject the humongous monster to sheer humiliation by Cherry Tapping it with the pitchfork, if you're patient enough. Or if you have the Life Leech, just place it on the ground using Secondary Fire and it'll take care of the beast for you.
  • Being set on fire completely stunlocks the Gargoyles' attacks. They're fairly resistant to fire in and of itself, but the Flare Gun can keep them lit for a reliably long time, so firing three or four flares with primary fire at them, letting them get close and having at them with the pitchfork is a great way to save ammo.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "Mall Of The Dead" is a spoof of Dawn of the Dead (1978). Blood is the Ur-Example of the "fast zombie". And then we have Dawn of the Dead (2004), the Trope Codifier for it.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: One of the main criticisms of the game is its far steeper difficulty compared to fellow first-persons shooters of the time. A lot of enemies are hitscan, a lot more are Goddamned Bats, maps can be incredibly large and labyrinthine, and your arsenal of weapons is unorthodox with high skill ceiling, promoting a Difficult, but Awesome playstyle. It's one of the reasons why its remained a Cult Classic rather then a broader hit like Duke and Shadow Warrior.
• Nintendo Hard: The game isn't very balanced in the damage department, with even the weakest of mooks dealing absurd amounts of damage, not helped by the fact that the game has a wider variety of hitscan enemies than most other shooters of the mid-nineties. Don't feel bad about playing on the lowest difficulty setting your first time through (even though a glitch in some versions makes enemies deal even more damage on that difficulty).
• Obvious Beta: The Fresh Supply remaster was released in a very, very broken state: enemy behavior is broken, some textures are glitching or missing, crashes, broken weapons (such as the Life Leech, which doesn't absorb the enemies' HP, and the Tesla Cannon, which shoots 4 projectiles instead of 5), low volume for some of Caleb's lines, unplayable multiplayer, missing graphical effects and so on. Thankfully, Nightdive managed to fix most of the bugs.
• Polished Port: Nightdive Studios finally secured the rights to release a remaster of the original game in 2019. Blood: Fresh Supply features support for up to 4K resolution, fixed mouse control with an option of proper vertical look, new touches like voxel support and difficulty modification, comes with all of the base and expansion episodes like One Unit Whole Blood, and still supports all existing custom content for the original game as well.
• Porting Disaster:
  • While Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D both got updated Dosbox releases on Steam that fixed the mouse and keyboard controls for modern gamers, the Dosbox release of One Unit Whole Blood does not have these updates. The controls are exactly the same as they were upon the game's original release, making the mouse controls a nightmare to configure.
  • Blood: Fresh Supply suffered from this in its initial release with a number of bugs and gameplay inconsistencies from the original game. Part of this was due to Nightdive Studios being forced to rebuild the game in a new engine due to Atari forbidding access to the game's source code. Fortunately, Fresh Supply was quickly patched to address most issues.
• Scrappy Weapon: In the Fresh Supply rerelease of the first game, the Aerosol Flamethrower is far less effective than it once was: the flames take much longer to ignite enemies, and they don't pass through targets as well, making it largely ineffective in its original role as a crowd-control weapon and a Bloated Butcher counter. The secondary fire where you toss it like a grenade is still as good for clearing rooms as ever, though.
• Special Effect Failure: The cinematics have not aged well, to the point of bordering on So Bad, It's Good. Caleb's attempt to grab Ophelia out of Cheogh's claws (e.g. jumping in the air and flailing his arms in a silly manner) is corny enough, but when Caleb's hat falls off in the first cinematic, keen-eyed viewers will spot that Caleb seems to have neither hair nor ears.^note Word of God mentions that technical limitations, the cinematics being made at the last minute, the 3D modelers (of average talent) who borrowed the stop-motion puppets used for reference not being informed that Caleb does have hair, and the difficulties changing anything once everything was animated already lead to the baldness being left in.
• That One Boss:
  • Cerberus blows all the other bosses in the base game out of the water, between his rather high health and extremely powerful ranged attacks. On higher difficulties, taking a single hit is either fatal, or will blind you, leaving you open for the second hit.
  • The Beast boss fight in Post Mortem is downright notorious. He starts as a shotgun-wielding Cabal member in red robes, but when you take enough health off, he goes One-Winged Angel, at which the actual terror begins. If the Beast gets relatively near you, he does a Shockwave Stomp that knocks off a good chunk of your health, stuns you, cannot be blocked, and penetrates armor. Essentially, he's a walking "Instant Death" Radius, and the only chance you have is to stay as far away as possible, unload your handful of long-range weapons while perpetually sprinting backward, and hope you have enough ammo to kill him. And then you have to do it again, because there's three red-robes and you have to kill at least two of them.
• Win Back the Crowd: Upon Fresh Supply's release, it was pretty buggy. Not only that, but lots of things about the visuals and the game's rules (such as Bloated Butchers being weak to fire, and Fanatics never throwing dynamite) were flat out broken. Almost immediately after it was released and all the feedback had piled in, a patch was released to fix virtually all of these issues. Further patches made it better, made primarily to fix compatibility with game mods.

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