Neon Blood

You’d be surprised to learn that Neon Blood is developer Chaotic Brain Studios first game when you first lay eyes on it. The visual presentation of the game reeks of people with much more experience, but it shows the talents of the team members that this game has such an impact straight from the off. It’s a shame then that this game turned into a perfect example of how putting too much attention into the visuals made other parts of the game suffer.

In Neon Blood, you play as Alex McCoin, a police detective who used to be at the top of his game. But when we meet up with Alex, he has had quite the fall from grace, struggling to remember things and well known to be a spark (a drug) junkie. It is normal for the population of Viridis (the planet) to have mechanical implants to aid them in daily life, but Ruby Emerald has a sinister plot to take over everyone’s implants to end pain, hunger, and illness. The consequences unfortunately outweigh the positives, and it left it to Alex to uncover Ruby’s intentions, the sinister corruption plaguing the city, and other dirty shenanigans.

This investigation is based on wandering the streets of Blind City, talking to the inhabitants, and using your scanner to search for clues to progress the investigation to its conclusion. At some points you’ll be required to fight other characters through turn based combat. At first, I felt that this was a wise choice, giving the game a nice mix of genres. The trouble was that this combat was really quite simple and with not much danger of losing. There was some attempt to give this some depth by adding in multiple types of bullets, grenades, and so on, but these were not really needed, as some good head shots really did the job. You may land a critical shot, which made things even easier, and it was all quite tedious. I ended up just going through the motions, gladly beating my opponent so I could move on. Even the QTE sessions were not much better; with a generous time limit, they were no trouble at all, and with no sound effects, it all felt a little off.

Part of the game’s visual design is the perspective you play at. With a 2.5D presentation, the game environments can be much deeper than they look. See an alley in the background? Then you’ll probably be able to go down there and find another street to explore. The trouble with this perspective was not being able to see all the things that would get in my way, so I ended up constantly being slowed down by props or NPC’s because I couldn’t judge the space correctly, and when you add in the game’s dark lightning, it became quite the frustration. I admire the idea, and it did bring some interest to the exploration, but it needed a bit more refinement to get it to where it wasn’t to be a hindrance.

At some points you will be presented with puzzles that will need completing; these range from gathering information to answering questions, or it could be following a trail of substance to find a suspect. Id say I didn’t have any trouble solving these, and every one was a little to simple. Everyone or everything you can interact with is clearly labelled, so it was a case of talking to everyone, seeing what was interactable, scanning until you found a clue, moving on, and repeat. There didn’t seem to have been enough effort put into this part of the game, as it very much felt like, as with the battling, just going through the motions.

This lack of detail spread to the game options too. When I unlocked the scanner function, I wanted to remap its function to another button, so I went to the options to do so and found nothing there. Literally nothing. No button remapping, no resolution options, gameplay choices, nothing. Obviously, if the basics were missing, so were any signs of accessibility options. I found this to be a weird omission, like, all games come with basic options, and for all to be obsolete here was frankly a really big miss by the developers. So I was forced to continue using the button I didn’t want to use, stuck with whatever the developers decided I should be using.

There were other moments throughout the game that made it feel like everything was rushed. For example, when you gain more health or a new ability, you get a box appear on screen to tell you, but that’s it. No celebration, and certainly no fanfare. The box will say youve gained more power and a new ability, but it won’t tell you what that ability is, and it’ll just dump it in your inventory in the hope youll remember to check it in the next battle. This led me to forget about many new abilities, and I continued to use my headshot, but I did stumble on some of these near the end of my three-hour playthrough, and if I had remembered them sooner, I would have certainly used them, as some sounded pretty interesting. I was left frustrated though, as with a little explanation, when I earned these abilities, it would have gone a long way to me using them more regularly.

But the standout of the game, and where most of the developers attention seemed to have gone, was in the game’s visuals. Everything looked wonderful in these pixel-based graphics. The neon really shone and gave the world this futuric cyberpunk feel that I couldn’t stop admiring. There was plenty of detail included throughout the world, with broken building signs, animals roaming, and the streets populated well. The character designs were also a highlight, with Alex looking cool in his long drenchcoat, his chief in the expected shirt and trousers, and other characters dressed appropriately. The music, though, was another matter, with at first enjoyable synth-based tracks that soon became too much as they were loud and overbearing. Although this style of music fitted in really well with the visuals, I wouldn’t have minded a few quieter moments with the soundtrack, so when there were segments that should of had music but didn’t, I was quite relieved.