E3 2004 showed us the likes of Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Resident Evil 4, and the infamous ‘blades will bleed’ trailer that introduced us to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It also marked the debut of a mostly forgotten pirate action game called Captain Blood, which would end up getting retooled multiple times only to be quietly canceled because of a rather complicated legal dispute. 20 years later, it’s finally being released for real, and you can get an early taste with a Steam Next Fest demo that’s got me weirdly nostalgic for all the bad PS3 games I played in my late teens.
In its final form, Captain Blood had morphed into a God of War-style brawler with stylized visuals, and that’s exactly what you’ll get here. Mash X and occasionally Y to throw down combos, tap the trigger occasionally to fire off a ranged shot to keep enemies at bay, and hack and slash your way through a bunch of linear levels, occasionally stopping to break down a door, angrily open a chest, or murder passing civilians.
The key gimmick is the execution system, which lets you tap B just once to straight-up instantly kill basic enemies. This ability feels completely broken when it’s first introduced, but it soon becomes clear that ‘normal’ enemies are actually just fodder, and the meat of the combat is against sturdier foes whose health you have to whittle down before going for an execution. Defeated baddies drop money you can spend on upgrades, including additional execution moves that do things like refill your ‘rage’ ability bar or make enemies drop more cash, so you get a little bit of strategic decision-making when deciding how to murder your opponents.
Is Captain Blood good? Uh, not really. This is the kind of game that would’ve gotten unflattering comparisons to games like God of War 3 – or heck, even Heavenly Sword and Dante’s Inferno – at the time of its intended release in 2010, and age isn’t doing it any favors. Yet the demo had me utterly charmed from beginning to end. I feel like I rented this exact game at least 34 times between 2005 and 2012, and revisiting all these design tropes – right down to the awkward QTEs – has me pining for the worse games of better days. Bless the folks bringing Captain Blood back today.
Every single title on our list of the best PS3 games outclasses Captain Blood, but they’ll put you in a similar spirit.
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