Captain Blood Steam Charts & Stats

We need more games like this

i don't actually think it's a very fun game but i'm glad that it came out

Game 4/10 Ninja physics 5/10 Jackanism 8/10 WOKE 1/10

4/10 I’m not convinced this would have been a standout release even had it launched on schedule during the Xbox 360 era. Today, resurrected from production limbo, it feels positively fossilized. I never held much affection for the pre-reboot God of War template, yet Dynasty Warriors Origins proved earlier this year that a well-made hack-and-slash can still hook me. This one simply doesn’t. The visuals, though dated, are excusable: the project was frozen in amber circa 2010, and its chunky models and desaturated palette probably looked respectable back then. What can’t be waved away is the staggering enemy repetition. Fewer than ten archetypes populate the entire campaign, so encounters slide into déjà vu within minutes. Combat is the real Achilles’ heel. There is virtually no room for improvisation - tap out the single viable combo, fire the pistol as cooldown filler, repeat ad infinitum. Waves of identical fodder pour in until you realize sprinting past them is both possible and, judging by an achievement shared by a third of players, widely adopted. Slaying enemies yields gold, but the store’s meager selection - extra grenades, minor combo variations - hardly justifies the effort. I bowed out during a late mission that demands pulverizing a cannon while kiting infinite mobs. Thirty minutes of attrition ended with a death and an unceremonious checkpoint reset; I lacked the will to reenact the ordeal. Maritime interludes fare no better: maneuvering a gunship while boarding parties and rival broadsides interrupt your firing animation feels less like naval warfare than a test of patience. Land stages are punctuated by doors that require several seconds of button-mashing; any stray hit cancels the animation, guaranteeing an encore of frustration. Narrative might have offered redemption, but the audio mix is a crime scene. Dialogue sinks beneath roaring ambience for most cut-scenes, and subtitles can only be toggled from the main menu - a concession I discovered too late. I began skipping cinematics, only to be ambushed by unskippable Quick-Time Events embedded within them, as if the game were punishing disinterest. Whatever ambition once animated this project has been smothered by time. The final product is a museum piece best appreciated behind glass by scholars of cancelled games. If you harbor deep nostalgia for the button-mashing blood operas of the mid-2000s you may eke out some charm; for everyone else, there are fresher, fiercer alternatives on every platform.

As much as I hate to admit it - no, even at a fair price in PLN (for once!) this game is just not worth it. It's not all bad - a lot of the animations in the game are actually really good. The cutscenes are well directed and the combat can be pretty fun. But sadly, as you play, you slowly start to realise that that's it - that while the combat can be looking all flashy and be nicely animated, there is not enough done to mix things up and keep it fresh for the entire duration of the game. And that is if you haven't already given up, after hearing the atrocious sound mixing this game has. Then after a level or 2 you might notice issues with shadows being incorrectly rendered on water (over most opaque elements) and eventually stumble into one of many softlocks that this game has forcing you to revert to previous checkpoint, which - unfortunately - is going to be at the beginning of the level (due to how sparse checkpoints are). It's a shame really - the foundation is interesting. I like the colorful, simplistic graphics, but the technical issues and how repetitive this game is push what could have been a mediocre game into a straight up bad territory. I truly hope SNEG can get their developers to art least fix most of softlocks, fix shadow rendering on water and - most importantly - fix the audio issues. But even if they do - this will at best make Captain Blood a mediocre game. I applaud SNEG for this preservation effort - it is commendable. But that still doesn't make it a good game, sadly.

Stunlocked: The Game Okay, thay might be unfair, first I do want to congratulate the team for ressurrecting a game from 2004 in 2025, every game deserves to make the light of day no matter how good or bad and it's up for each individual player to figure out if it's good or bad on their own, subjective opinions and all that. And I really though Captain Blood was for me, I love games from that era, and a Hack n Slash inspired by the original God of War games sounds like a fun time, I expected a simple game inferior to GoW of course, and I got a simple game, there are only XXXX (light attack) and YYYY (heavy attack) combos and you have to unlock any mixture of them from the upgrade shop which makes a simple game even simpler at the start, but what caught my attention was the ability to pick up and throw barrels and crates at enemies, the ability to buy an upgrade that allows you to steal your enemies weapons when you execute them and the chests spread around the game containing health that you can use in a pinch, all of this reminded of the simple but still fun heat of the moment resource management of arcade beat em ups, it's fun and perhaps the game would be better if the upgrades were just attack increase and health increase and let all of the combos from the get go so it would be less monotonous. Unfortunately the game suffers from a lot of problems, there is a parry but it is pathetic, it feels bad to use and it's even hard to tell when you managed one so you can follow with a counter attack, there is a rage mode but it is pathetically short and due to long winded executions animations you have to use on 90% of enemies you can usually only kill one heavy enemy before it expires, with no ability to upgrade it, honestly, the beat em up elements I mentioned earlier are the only fun to manage part of the games. And of course, enemy groups are designed in a way that different enemy types love to stunlock you by beginning their attack as soon as the other enemies ended theirs or spamming grenades/bullets to keep essentially not playing for extended periods of time, the game's idea of a difficulty curve is to spam bigger and bigger enemy groups with bigger and bigger health pools and higher and higher stunlock potential, it's annoying and bad. So why did I play until the end? Because when I started getting bored the game introduced a grenade throwing enemy that Captain Blood can remove their heads off with his bare hands and then throw them like a human grenade, because there's a cutscene in which Captain Blood pushes back against a bullet that hits his sword as if the bullet is being pushed onto him like a sword, basically, because it is filled with ridiculous, awesome shit, 2000's style. It's jank, but it's fun enough to push you through. Unfortunately though, the game suffers from severe save issues, at one point in the game I thought I had found a bug because a combo I bought was no longer working, only to find out the combo locked itself again in the shop window, which is super bad given every playthough has a limited amount of gold in it, but to make matters worse once you reach the Siege of Cartagena chapter, the game refused to save at all, every checkpoint returning a "Save Failed" message so you basically have to finish the rest of the game in one go once you hit that. Funny bugs and wacky ragdolls I can take, but a game releasing with severe save bugs that result in lost progression, sometimes lost progression that CAN'T be gotten back since the game RELOCKS upgrades so you just gotta spend more money to get it again, that's ridiculous, no product should be sold in that state, this is the rare but sadly true OBJECTIVELY BAD. As a side note I also couldn't buy the last pistol upgrade AND the game unlocked an achivement for purchasing all upgrades even though I hadn't when I hit the final chapter, just take it back to the workshop boys, this shit is messy.

Captain Blood is exactly the game it looks like it is, and not a single pixel more. It's a straightforward, somewhat janky, deeply goofy, budget God of War style hack-and-slash from a bygone era. And yet that's exactly what makes it one of the most unusual games released this year. Because it was never meant to be released this year. It is quite literally an unreleased game from 2010, completed but canceled and set adrift by publisher shenanigans. That alone makes it strange enough. How often do we get to see a project like that reemerge? It's not a new game deliberately evoking the past but the genuine article. A paradoxically New Old Game, rescued like a cast away lost on a deserted island for 15 years. And the world has changed a lot in its absence. As a game in 2010, I don't exactly think it would have lit the world on fire. It is undeniably rough in many ways. Never outright broken, everything [i]works[/i], but you can feel the deck creaking beneath your feet. It feels like something destined to be found for cheap on a used shelf and picked up on a whim. Dumb fun for a long weekend or dipped into occasionally when the mood strikes. And here's the thing, I like games like that. I [i]miss[/i] games like that. I like when games are allowed to be rough, and eccentric. When they're allowed to be small and focused on doing a handful of things really well, or even just well enough. I like seeing things persist outside of major popular trends, and I like seeing proof that we didn't have to stop making certain genres just because of publisher profit expectations. Sometimes these games can be weird experiments. Sometimes they're small teams punching way above their weight. And sometimes they're small games content to simply be resoundingly "good", with a comfortably lower case g. At one time all these things were the mid-budget or "AA" space, and it's been complicated for a while now. In fact, by all accounts Captain Blood itself was a victim of publishers increasingly de-prioritizing mid-budget titles during the 360/PS3 era. More recently AA games have been slowly reasserting themselves, awkwardly smeared across overlapping strata of high-budget indies and low-budget studios until no one is quite sure which is which or what those labels even mean anymore. And while most will point to standout titles that found unexpected success or the cult classics that built momentum over time, I think it's worth remembering the other side of the AA coin. Sometimes resoundingly "good" is good enough. This is what makes Captain Blood such a fascinating time capsule. Because as a game in 2025 Captain Blood becomes unexpectedly novel and deeply charming. Less of a cast away and more of a species we feared might have gone extinct, until someone randomly spots one in the wild. It's not the most remarkable game of the year, and yet it's remarkable that it even exists. It's unusual because it was at one time so incredibly normal. It's rough and does little to innovate, but it's a silly and stylish burst of a genre that's fallen by the wayside. It's great because it's allowed to be ok. It's the most 7-out-of-4 game to ever 3-out-of-5. It is exactly what it looks like it is. And not a pixel more was needed.

Such a fun game! Bright, colorful, full of adventure and bloodshed. I love these retro titles. I would love more games that are similar in style / feel.