Blood Drive

Put the car in reverse, immediately!

Posted 2 years ago By kingquagmire - David Collins

With how crowded gaming genres are these days, developers pretty much need a specific hook in order to draw crowds. Why have a standard action game when you can have one with an all-encompassing open world to explore? Why have a vanilla tower defense game when you can have one with the characters from South Park in it? Why have a demolition derby game when you can have one with zombies in it? Wait, that last one has been done already. Readers, meet Blood Drive...

Yeah, that’s Blood Drive in a nutshell. Think Carmegeddon with the undead. Blood Drive is a sport, pitting drivers with the task of winning various vehicular-based events, all the while contending with zombies that happen to be scattered about the arenas. Each vehicle comes with different stats - such as speed, durability, etc. - as well as a weapon load-out. Power-ups litter the arena which will mod your vehicle with new weapons or repair it from any of the damage your opponents dish out.

Featuring all the standard options such as multiple cups to win while playing all by your lonesome to squaring off with up to four friends in drop-in/drop-out multiplayer. There’s also single-event challenges available, should you not want to work the campaign. No matter if you are burning rubber through the tournament or one-offing it in the single challenges, the events all boil down to the same stuff: Kill as many zombies as possible, hit as many check points as possible, or obliterate your opponents as many times as possible.

That all sounds fine and dandy though. I can handle a game like that. It wouldn’t be played on a daily basis, but it will get some love from me periodically as I need to burn off some steam. Unfortunately, Blood Drive is just too inconsistent and clumsy for me to even put in the console periodically. The driving mechanics are wishy-washy, responding as they should at times, not responding at others. The stats do nothing to notably differentiate each vehicle and the AI seems to always be a step ahead. It was a struggle to make the top 3, even during the first cup.

Another hit the game takes is on the visuals. The centerpiece or “hook” as I mentioned before is the zombies. But it’s hard to really pay them any attention when the entire game looks like it just arrived here from 2004. As you’re hauling tail through each of the six arenas, the zombies could be regular pedestrians, heck they could even be animated mannequins and you wouldn’t know the difference. They play no role beyond being cannon fodder for your front grill. And the audio? It’s just as forgettable as the visuals are.

If this is supposed to be a “sport”, I wold think there would be a greater emphasis on the presentation. The visuals should be up-ticked a bit more. Zombies should have been used more creatively, such as maybe herding them into potential traps or even make them have the means to fight back instead of just lumbering around into your bumper. We could have had a more profound set of event bonuses for special in-match challenges. There’s a lot more things that could have been done really spotlight Blood Drive’s potential.

Conclusion

I really wanted to like this game. Seriously, I really did. Unfortunately, Blood Drive is both out of date and has already been done, only better. Sure, there are zombies in it, but zombies don’t always equate a great game. The mechanics are sloppy, the AI hates you right out of the gate, and the goals are uninteresting at best. At $50, Blood Drive is a tough sell. Maybe at a $20 budget price, it would be an easier pill to swallow. As it is, you would be better off waiting for Twisted Metal.