Bloodshore review friv game - "Kinzo" for the evening
The new FMV game from Good Gate Media and Friv2Online Studio pokes fun at popular TV shows and the Battle Royale genre, and boasts nearly 300 filmed scenes, of which you'll see at best a fifth on your first playthrough. We tell in the review how good (or bad) Bloodshore is.
The friv game takes place in the near future, where the reality show Kill / Stream is a huge success - something like a "royal battle" between streamers, bloggers and just thrill seekers. Heroes are sent to the island, where they fight to the last for an impressive cash prize.
The new season of the show also features our main character - Nick Romeo, a once-famous child actor from a very popular werewolf series, who lost his former glory and sank to the very bottom after years of drinking and drugs. Nick claims to be involved in Kill/Stream for the money, but soon discovers ulterior motives - however, other characters are also hiding aces up their sleeves.
Bloodshore is an FMV game, which means that all the scenes are pre-filmed with live actors, and the player only makes choices that will set the story on one path or another. In this genre, given the scarcity of gameplay, fun action and good acting are important, and the project does a good job on both criteria.
Events unfold very quickly, there are few filler episodes here, and locations instantly replace each other. There is no need to be bored, and from the beginning to the end of the story you follow its development with interest.
The developers did not drag out the passage: the first run to victory (or defeat - depends on your actions) will take no more than an hour and a half, after which you will definitely want to replay - to see other endings (there are several of them), knock out all the achievements (for the first passage of the game rewarded me with only one achievement out of the available seventeen), find all the forks in the plot (there are at least two sharp turns that greatly affect the narrative).
The actors play their roles very well, and you believe most of them - both the protagonist, a typical good guy, and other characters, among whom there are both heroes and villains, and those who skillfully pretend for the time being. Archetypes are well written, like a blogger, a survivalist, a tough girl, and so on. One of the actors seemed familiar to me, and my intuition did not deceive me - he had previously appeared in the great FMV comedy game Not for Broadcast.
Although the plot is predictable and somewhat banal, referring us to The Hunger Games and Black Mirror, it is skillfully presented and cleverly diluted with inserts that pull us out of the island and transfer us to TV studios, streamers' rooms, places in various parts of the world. ball from where the entertainment-hungry spectators watch the fight to the death.
It is also important here that any decisions affect the statistics on five key indicators: team morale, the opinion of the audience, romance, strength and ideas. It is unlikely that these indicators change the course of the plot, but it is still funny to see how, due to unpopular deeds, public interest in the hero is rapidly falling.
As for the gameplay, it's not in Bloodshore. In key scenes, you simply choose one of the options for the development of events - that's all the game mechanics. The timer encourages you to think faster, but otherwise, no challenge. Even the death of a character only returns you to the last checkpoint. However, it would be foolish to scold the friv game of the FMV genre for this: we still have an interactive movie, and not a first-person shooter or MMORPG.
You need to be able to shoot a good FMV. The authors of Bloodshore succeeded: the actors are convincing, the script is addictive, and the toy weapons are almost not striking. If you need a "kintso" for a couple of evenings - do not pass by.