YMMV / Blood II: The Chosen

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Caleb was pretty indifferent to humans (at best), so him sealing the rift between Earth and alternate world (thus saving the former) in the second game raised quite a lot of questions. What was his true motivation? Did he accept his role as Tchernobog? Or did his alignment change after encountering the Ancient One? Did he warm up a bit after he met his long-time friends? Or, possibly, did he have other plans for his homeworld after his friends returned (because he most likely wouldn't even want to stay in the alternate world)?
  • The game indulges in this itself, between the actual gameplay and the interstitial texts on the loading screens. Going by what the loading screens claim, Caleb fancies himself as something of a megalomaniacal Card-Carrying Villain, hoping to take over the Cabal once Gideon's dealt with (or just get rid of them once and for all) and rule the world, even mentioning several policies he has planned for once that happens, such as getting rid of sewers entirely. Cutscenes and gameplay really don't bear this out - at best, he'd be content to just keep killing people for his own amusement even past the apocalypse brought about by his failure to maintain the rifts between Earth and the otherworld, even stating on several occasions that he doesn't give two shits about his role as the One That Binds and outright welcoming said apocalypse at one point. The unreleased Revelations expansion pack would have gone with the former characterization, with Caleb having returned to Earth and taken over the Cabal, only to find himself in the midst of a power struggle between them and an offshoot cult named the Krest.
  • Among Caleb's voice clips is a genuinely pained "Make the hurting stop!"^note Two variants: exhausted and urgent. Why would he of all people say something like that? Especially given that his other reactions to taking damage are wordless grunts/screams or threats.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Behemoth, by far the most underwhelming of the bosses because of how mundane it is - as durable as it is, its only attacks are running up to you to punch you out in close range, or pounding the ground repeatedly to hit you out to a couple feet, and that's it. You can easily outrun it in all but one of the encounters with it, but that that just serves to further highlight how terrible a boss concept it is, especially since the developers loved the thing and threw it in as often as possible, with it serving as a relatively common Elite Mook throughout the third chapter of the base game and it appearing at least once in three of the expansion's six levels, in which the only time it is a genuine threat is in Ishmael's level, where you are restricted to 100 health maximum and its encounters are either extremely cramped quarters or a parking lot with three of them to just pound the ground repeatedly as an impromptu barricade.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Fanatics, again. They often have fast-firing guns and just enough health to take a beating and just keep the trigger pressed for a good while before they start flinching. Hurt them enough, but fall just short of killing them, and they're one scream away from becoming Action Bombs^note They also do this if they run out of ammo (which can happen, surprisingly enough), but often they'll be dead before that happens. Oh, and Tchernobog's essence help you if you meet one with a BFG that has Splash Damage like the Napalm Cannon - they may be slow-firing for you, but they shoot them just as fast any other non-machine gun weapon, which includes the pistol. Forget Shikari and Drudge-type mooks: these special forces soldiers will definitely be your main cause of death when playing this game.
  • Death Shrouds, due to both their super persistent homing exploding skulls and their Intangibility when they're not attacking. And unlike the teleporting Zealots, they can easily tank dozens of flares. Fortunately, they're not immune to Splash Damage while they're intangible, so weapons like the Howitzer and the Napalm Cannon shine against them.
  • Drudge Lords. Too common to be a Boss in Mook Clothing, these tough bad boys' main lethal factor is a bug detailed in the Obvious Beta part of the main page: they can move while shooting. As if three rapid-fire Napalm Cannon fireballs with splash damage that can hurt through walls wasn't bad enough, try three rapid-fire Napalm Cannon fireballs launched at you from around a corner before you're even aware he was preparing to fire them at you. The game also has a disturbing tendency to place them in overly-cramped quarters where dodging their fireballs is nigh-impossible, including one of the subway train runs.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: Insofar as an unreleased expansion (Revelations) can count for this, it's generally believed that the series dodged the reveal-bullet that was Tchernobog fully possessing Caleb at the end of the first game despite all evidence to the contrary, up to and including Caleb's rejection of his old master's role. While the actual result of this twist would have been interesting (player control switching to Cain, with Tchernobog's essence either remaining with him or returning to Caleb), it would've torn gaping holes in what was left of the game's story logic.
• Game-Breaker: The Death Ray energy rifle in the unmodified game. It does more damage per shot on primary fire than the Tesla Cannon, and only uses 1 ammo per blast, so it's ridiculously efficient even if you don't know how to bounce your shots. The kicker is that there's only one in the whole game (early on in the meat processing plant in a very dark and difficult-to-navigate secret area whose location isn't obvious); if you missed it, that's it.
• Goddamned Bats: Bone Leeches, Thieves and the Hands again. All of them are "clingy" like the original Choking Hand and can be a pain to remove from your face, though this time there's no Game-Breaking Bug and none of them are nearly as fast as it, so they're much easier to manage.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the v1.0 retail build, you can replicate ammo: drop the weapon you're holding and immediately move to stand on top of it, and you'll get the same ammo as a fresh pickup (in the case of one-handed guns like the SMG and Sawed-Off Shotgun, you'll get a duplicate weapon). It makes heavier weapons infinitely more practical, and even if not, still worth having in the arsenal, as they give quite a lot of ammo in a fresh pickup. It was fixed with the Nightmare Levels expansion.
  • Drudge Lords can be Demonic Spiders as above given their tendency to cue up fireballs from around a corner and launch them once they're around it, but one interesting part of this is that if you pop into or out of their sight while they're preparing those fireballs, but before they actually start launching, they'll reset their animation. This can be caused by something as simple as passing behind another enemy like a Soul Drudge while the Drudge Lord is preparing to fire.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: There's an Easter Egg on one map which is a hidden Predator lair, including a couple of xenomorph skulls. Three years later, Monolith made Alien vs Predator 2.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: On Genocide (Easy) you take so little damage and enemies die so fast that the game is extremely easy in contrast to the first game.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: On any difficult higher than Genocide (Easy) there's simply not enough health and late-games enemies have too high health considering the randomized damage numbers, making the game extremely tedious and borderline luck-based at times.
• Nintendo Hard: Downplayed compared to the first game, but the default difficulty, its equivalent to a normal difficulty, is still equivalent to the Harder Than Hard difficulty of many other FPS games.
• Obvious Beta: Sadly (or not), the game didn't quite have the quality of a retail game by the time it was released, and was never fully fixed. The game is rife with glitches and programming errors, such as:
  • Cultists, Fanatics and Prophets may die before flinching even once. It happens most often when you're shooting them in the head with a bullet-based weapon: the game does have headshot mechanics, but calling them "inconsistent" is putting it mildly.
  • Shooting a Prophet enough will make him switch to the knife for no reason. When using said knife, they'll first reach out to the target in a full two-second "grab" animation that doesn't hold the target in place, to only then deliver three measly stabs. It's ironic that the most dangerous Elite Mooks of the game can be made the easiest to kite by far.
  • Enemies tend to get frozen at the end of an attack/flinch animation if they can't see or get to the player by the end of it, instead of going idle or prowling the level.
  • The second sawed-off is held by a second right hand of Caleb's (the model isn't mirrored like the other dual-wielded guns). Extra Crispy fixes that.
  • The flare gun's secondary fire doesn't ignite enemies at all.
  • Behemoths can damage themselves with their own shockwaves by a tiny amount, but enough to make them pound the ground repeatedly for no reason, effectively committing suicide.
  • The other Chosen, despite being friendly in-story, have in-game entities that are hostile to Caleb. This in and of itself wouldn't be a problem, since they only show up in cutscenes where the cutscene logic takes priority and they won't do bad things to you, but it does become a problem if, in a double-instance of bugginess, the cutscene ends early for whatever reason. The end of Chapter One is a particularly infamous case, where Gabriella will promptly shoot you to death with a weapon you don't get until two chapters later.
  • Another issue with cutscenes is that Caleb can still be moved around by moving scenery objects depending on where you stand when you trigger them. Again, this normally isn't a problem - while the first time it can happen is in the second level, the worst that comes of it is Caleb sliding off-screen because the player went up a down escalator - it can spell death in the second chapter due to a sad combination of a cutscene beginning as the player is walking through a door they just opened, doors automatically closing themselves a few seconds after being opened, and doors being able to crush anything in their path, including between themselves and their frame while closing.
  • The first fight with Gideon often ends before you fully deplete his health. After the cutscene, you have around 20 seconds to free roam before the next level loads. In the second fight, he flinches with absolutely any damage you deal, and the minigun can lift him up into the air; upon death, his body may clip through the floor and drop to the lower boundaries of the level.
  • In the initial release, dropping weapons and standing on top of them nets you ammo for them like if you'd just picked them up for the first time.
  • Some enemies, like the third Soul Drudge in Love Canal, will be permanently stuck attacking the air (often several times faster than normal despite not corresponding to the animation playing) unless you shoot them.
  • Drudge Lords are elevated from a simple Giant Mook to a Demonic Spider because of the fact that, if you move out of sight while they're in the midst of their fireball attack, they will slide across the ground while continuing to throw fireballs. If you're just around the corner, it's frequently deadly. Conversely, if you move out of sight while they're preparing to throw fireballs, and then move yourself back in to their line of sight - such as, say, repeatedly moving back and forth between a Soul Drudge that's between you and the Drudge Lord - they will reset the animation, making them completely harmless until you're ready to deal with them. Also, if they change targets in the midst of their fireball attack, e.g. killing their initial target with the first fireball and still having two more to go, they can fire them off at extreme angles, at least slightly further than 90 degrees, without actually turning their bodies towards their new target.
  • Hostile entities are, for most intents and purposes, treated the same as the human player. They even have an internal ammo stockpile — and can, as such, take ammo pickups before you have the chance to get them yourself. This is particularly pronounced in the third level of the expansion, where it is guaranteed that a Shikari will grab some of the ammo in a fenced-off area before you can get in.
  • Splash Damage completely disconsiders map geometry. If you're not a certain distance away from the center point of an explosion, you will be damaged by it; hiding behind a thin wall or corner is not just useless, it's worse than running away.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The game has semi-randomized values for damage that, while not unheard of in an FPS, has far greater variability than normal, to the point one can instakill one enemy by firing a flare at them and then watch as the next eats two shotgun shells directly to the face before dying. On top of Luck-Based Mission and reliability issues, this makes weapons with low firing rates borderline useless, because sometimes firing the Howitzer or the Napalm Cannon won't even annoy your basic mook. One of the more popular mods for the game cuts it out entirely.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Insect-a-Cutioner. Primary fire averts No "Arc" in "Archery" and has a stupidly short reach as a result, while Secondary Fire is entirely useless because of programming errors, and even if it wasn't, the wind-up is long and the fire rate is even slower than the already slow primary. The only reasonable use for it was in early versions, as a way to check how much DieBugDie spray you had in reserve, and with the late patches, that feature was added to the assault rifle's HUD and put the final nail in the coffin for the bug sprayer.
  • The Napalm Cannon was nerfed so hard between games^note by weakening the shots, slowing down both fire rate and projectile speed, and removing the afterburn effect entirely that any mid-tier conventional weapon does a better job than it. Said conventional weapons are found at least five levels earlier than the Napalm Cannon — it doesn't show up until halfway through the second chapter.
  • The Howitzer is a hitscan bazooka. Sounds good, right? Wrong. Its shells are some of the hardest ammo pickups to come by, and are too weak to generally bother with. It does have a niche use against Shikari, though, because each shot consistently makes them flinch.
  • If the Singularity Generator was a mook instead of a BFG, it would be a prime example of Fake Ultimate Mook. The singularity doesn't hurt enough to kill a mid-tier enemy while sucking it in, and while this wouldn't be a problem normally, the eye of the vortex deals a grand total of zero damage. Its only real use would be to drag and hold enemies away from you for some breathing room, but at the cost of 50 ammo cells, it's not worth it. In earlier versions, Secondary Fire created the singularity centered around Caleb as a damaging tractor shield of sorts, which worked well against the game's many Personal Space Invaders when paired up with the shotgun, but later on this feature was scrapped for unknown reasons (probably that shotgun shells to use with this combo are unreasonably rare across the chapter you get the Singularity Generator in) and left the SG as a Plot Device that Cabalco never got to work well enough.
• Sequelitis: Blood (1997) is considered a Cult Classic of early FPS design, with its distinctive aesthetic, crazy weapons, and challenging and ambitious levels. This game is generally remembered for being a very Obvious Beta, with unbalanced gameplay and a severe bug infestation that was soundly outclassed by Half-Life, the game that came out a year prior.
• Special Effect Failure: The cinematics give the first game's cutscenes a run for their money with absolutely ridiculous camera angles which do not focus on characters themselves but rather a fixated point in the area. As result, it's common to see camera angle which pans over nothing or barely distinguishable character models; sometimes it's the opposite and a character (usually Caleb himself) completely obscures the entire view.
• That One Level: There are a lot of difficult levels in the game, but the worst by far is "JoJo's Big Adventure" from the Nightmare Levels expansion. The primary reasons are twofold: one, you're playing as Ishmael in a sort-of flashback, which means different stats than Caleb - you have only 1 strength rather than Caleb's 5, meaning your health maxes out at the default 100 and you can carry barely any ammo. Two, the level is designed very tightly, requiring you to know exactly what to do and when to do it, conserving health and ammo exactly when you need them or else you'll run out. It gets more ridiculous as it goes on, quickly moving up from reskinned cultists who will ventilate you from the other side of any given area to swimming through the Bone Leech infested water tunnels to slogging through an endless horde of Shikari to forcing you to take on several Drudge Lords in quick succession, with any attempt to actually fight them quickly reminding the player that Ishmael simply does not carry enough ammo to deal with any of those other than the cultists. And, like every other level in the expansion, it ends with the devs showcasing their unhealthy obsession with the Behemoth, forcing you into an encounter with one (in a space so enclosed there is simply no room to avoid its shockwave attack if it decides to use it) that then leads to another encounter with three of them, by which point any player who still has their sanity will likely run past them to the exit.

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