BloodNet Reviews

Good old-school cyberpunk role playing game. Even though the graphics are poor by today's standards (were goo in the 90's), the game more than makes up with a deep story line and dialogues. Old favourite fantasy. If it were able to play this on Android phone, I would get into it in spare time.

Bottom line (conveniently at the top): Avoid at any cost (that Steam will charge you) I bought this game out of nostalgia, because I originally played it as a kid when it first came out. I couldn't finish it as kid and I figured that with my greater mental capabilities and the experience of an adult gamer I would be able to finish it now and get some closure. I was wrong. The gameplay is simply awful and counterintuitive. The design is basic and confusing (Hey, let's make every weapon and every item with the exact same grey design, then not give any information about it so no one will ever know what is better than what!) Dialogue is endless and dull. You need to scroll through endless text to get one nugget of information that you can easily miss. I gave up quite quickly and wanted to just finish the game using a video walkthrough. But the brave men and wo..(let's face it, just men) making these videos made it perfectly clear that it's still a boring, nightmarish experience to play the game, even when you know what you have to do. Never have I heard such grunts of frustration in a video walkthrough. This game will break you. Bottom line: See above.

I bought it again to try and finally finish it after getting far when i was a teen. I dont want to give this a bad review but... I cant play it. Its just too old and dated. BUT so much of it is brilliant. The design, aesthetics, attempt at making a great turn based rpg alas...The combat is a letdown and convoluted direction and UI. Your character is weak 2 Very weak no matter your options in the weird Create Character questions. . Theres no levelling up too. BUT underneath there is a beautiful amazing game...if only some1 would do a master reboot of the entire game. Theres some impressive Turnbased games out atm whose engine could be well suited to doing a reimagining of this game.

I really wanted to like this game; it has vampiers, cyberpunk, and that quirky 90's PC game vibe. Being a big fan of all the above, i was eager to play it...two big problems that really soured it for me: the controls and the lack of direction. First off the controls are not intuitive at all, over complex, and after two hours i still hadn't figuerd them out. And the lack of direction...i get that you've got a limited time to free yourself of the vampier curse before it's permanent, but how one goes about doing that i don't get at all. Having the whole city open for you would normally be fine, ecxept for a time limit situation that discorages wasting time exploring. 4/10 I'd only recomend this to hardcore retro masochists with more paticence then me.

i love this game even if its stupid and cantankerous. i did all the paths because i love to suffer the past. cybervampires

Bloodnet tries to be a lot of things and fails at it quite miserably, it wants to be a roleplaying game, but it also wants to be a point and click adventure game. its combat is some of the worst I've seen in an RPG, It's bloated and over-complicated and at times it's even hard to tell what's happening. it has a ton of character traits and stats for your character, most of them never or sparingly used. Bloodnet is the video game equivalent of a jumbled mess of different wires. But I still like its world-building and incredibly cheesy writing, it brings a smile to my face and I do personally enjoy trainwrecks like Bloodnet. but even though I feel this way towards the game, I wouldn't recommend others play it for themselves. if you wanna experience this game's wacky story, best watch a playthrough instead, this game aged like actual shit and I can't think of anyone I know off the top of my head that would enjoy something like this.

This is an extremely underrated game. The storyline, characters, world, and especially the dialogue, are brilliant. The game's unfortunate downside is that it attempts to be an RPG... and the action completely fails at being compelling or enjoyable. That said, if you can get past the terrible RPG elements (I'm sure there must be some way to at least hack the game to make the fights less annoying) you have a rather wonderful, well written, engrossing game that's brimming with clever ideas and inspired characters. Yes the graphics are a little garish at times, and the interface isn't the most friendly, but none of the downsides are enough to ruin the excellent writing that ties the whole thing together. If you're prepared to work through BloodNet's shortcomings, you'll find an extremely rewarding adventure game underneath. It isn't that hard. Try it.

Bloodnet is the single most influential game I've ever played. The characters are very rich, all with unique portraits and voice over dialogs, hundreds of them. There are also lots of recruitable characters, I'd say about 25, each with their own body graphics. The music is awesome and original, the script and dialog are amazing work of fiction, the whole making the game very immersive. But it's old, it's extremely non-linear, and some features are buggy. My favorite game of all time. Heck, my nickname and my email address and both from things in this game!

Don't mind the hours spent in the game. After refunding it, I ended up buying it on GOG to give it another try. I first want to preface this review by saying I went in totally blind. I have no nostalgia attached to it, and I come from a background of loving point-and-clicks. I also seek out any game of the cyberpunk genre I can get my hands on. That said, I wanted to like this game, but it felt impossible to. I saw it and I thought it was some kind of miracle I hadn't played it already. Even its subtitle "The Cyberpunk Vampire Game" seemed perfect (as well as amazingly corny) to me. The screenshots made it look fantastic in that old time-y gritty moody kind of way. I felt like whatever its cons were, I wouldn't let it keep me from enjoying a game that looked like I would love. But despite playing for long enough to get a handle on it, it still didn't work for me. Right off the bat the introduction has dialogue remeniscent of a real terrible early 80s B-movie, and the entire game follows a real similar note. I love B-movies, but I like the ones that have some kind of substance to them. To those who do not discriminate amongst the B-grade film and enjoy them all, you may enjoy the game's dialogue and story. I came in expecting cheesy shlock but the interactions in the game are just completely unentertaining and soulless. There's too much of it, and it all felt incredibly empty. At first glance Bloodnet looks like an adventure game, but it's very much an RPG as well as point-and-click. Even moreso, I'd say. You construct a character in detail from the very beginning. After making one, you're thrown in with absolutely no explaination of how anything in it works. I fumbled around with the controls and tried to figure them out, but they were so convoluted and made so little sense I ended up just getting frustrated, on more than one occasion. It's very, very easy to get frustrated at this game. The game's combat get a special mention for making absolutely no sense. After taking more than a few hours of mastering it I still have no idea how it works. Imagine arranging a bunch of sprites on a wallpaper and mashing a few keys on the keyboard; it would be about the same experience, and the only difference is doing the latter would save you from all the needlessly complicated aspects of the literal sprite-war. Speaking of, one of the more amusing things I noticed while playing was that moving your character around on the screen makes very little difference whatsoever ultimately, because you can just drag all the items in the room around the screen anyway. The music, while I initially thought helped add to the mood and atmosphere, eventually got grating to a point I had to turn it off. It's a mish-mash of totally random notes thrown into a midi blender and forcefully churned out. I turned general sound off too because not only was voice acting painfully sub-par, but it's neccessary in order to see subtitles/text. I was just playing it in total silence at that point, which wasn't too pleasant. I love games that throw you in with no explaination and don't hold your hand as they play, but Bloodnet goes too far with this. Even with a walkthrough, it's unbelievably difficult to get any sense of progression. Visually, however, this is where the game succeeds. It does an absolutely fantastic job setting a mood, almost unlike any other game I've ever played before. This is what had wowed me when I first found out about the title, and the screenshots essentially secured my purchase. It reminds me of Synnergist, which is a relatively unknown cyberpunk point-and-click adventure that was released in 1996, 3 years after Bloodnet. It really puts it into perspective -- it's amazing how well even now Bloodnet works on its visuals alone. It's what sparked my interest and it's probably what's going to spark others' too. Atmospherically it's a spectacle to look at and simply experience, and if only the rest of the game followed, it could have been something a lot more. There's a lot of potential. But I feel like the designers were too ambitious and tried too much at once. It ends up overall being a mess. It's a neat-to-look-at mess, but an unplayable one. Like others have said before me, the easiest way to sum it up is to say it has not aged well in the slightest. Recommended only to those who have the nostalgia factor I don't, or an insane amount of patience. Looking through the flaws and figuring out all the nonsense would be tough, but there are things to like about it for those who are willing to stomach its more unpleasant aspects. ___ Edit. Here's my in-depth review of the game: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/bloodnet/bloodnet.htm

This is a true Microprose masterpiece from the good old days! As a teenager I`ve been playing it for weeks, trying to figure out all the puzzles and quests, find every recruitable NPC with unique items\ inventory graphics, installing every possible cutting-edge cyberware, jury-rigging protective suits (about 12 of them) and weapons from junk and spare components. Background artwork is simply beautiful, music is haunting and atmospheric. Combat is complex and intense - in some situations it is highly recomended to use extra gear like doppelganger, virus-loaded data spiders against drones at TransTechnicals, holy water and wooden stakes against vampires (aim for torso, nothing else will work). You can kill almost anyone you want to at will, but please be carefull not to harm guards at Hellfire Club - it breaks the plot, making game unbeatable (learned it the hard way back then). Narrative is also intriguing, with many interesting characters and subplots. If you are a fan of cyberpunk genre and Gibson`s Neuromancer, this game is a must have! The main drawback imo is somewhat obscure UI and general difficulty level, especially for modern player. Takes some time to get into it, and a little bit of thinking - no one is going to hold your hand and explain what to do next. P.S About subtitles problem - you can activate them by turning off the sound in game options. It`s a pity we can`t have them with voice acting simultaneously.