Game Review: Blood Breed (Nintendo Switch)

I really wanted to love Blood Breed. After all, I grew up playing these retro-styled survival horror games. Unfortunately, the game is severely lacking in far too many departments to make it anything worth recommending. Ugly to look at, ugly to play and far more frustrating than it should be, Blood Breed is just simply not a good game.

You play as an unknown woman who is driving down a dark road when she hits a deer. Her car and the animal is mangled (an early clue about the adult nature of this game) and this is where control is given over to the player.

A huge building looms in the darkness, an obvious place to start, but once inside there is no help to be found. Instead mangled bodies litter the halls and rooms, twisted traps designed to maim are in abundance and a manic awaits in the darkness.

Your goal is to survive but also to find out the dark mystery behind this place.

With an immediate Silent Hill vibe, Blood Breed’s best moments are at the beginning and at the end. In between that though is a whole lot of horrible controls, repetitive visuals and frustrating one-hit deaths.

There is next to no dialogue and very few cutscenes, it’s simply about surviving a series of rooms and hallways. Either by getting around traps or by escaping the clutches of the manic killer, a lot of which is trial and error.

There is a sneak mechanic, something you will have to take advantage of when trying to find keys, but again, it’s done so poorly. It’s often easier and quicker to race around until you find the key, allow yourself to be killed, start the area again and go to the item outright.

With each area being quite small, it’s rarely an issue having to restart it over and over again. Mostly, it’s just really frustrating. The biggest offender being the corridor chase sequences. You’ll die a lot and curse a lot here. The combination of a horrible camera, horrible controls and the stamina meter making for the ultimate experience in frustration.

Blood Breed sells itself as being a brutal throwback but gets it completely wrong by being unnecessarily punishing. It’s not the only thing it gets wrong though.

As previously mentioned, Blood Breed is an ugly looking game. Stylised as PS1-era graphics, it overly exaggerates them though to point where detail is lost. For all its ‘nudity’ boasts, it’s all just pixilated mush anyway!

Even with many, many deaths Blood Breed can be completed in about two hours at most. The experience is short but will feel twice as long. A retro throw-back it is but a good retro throw-back it is not.