Even though it’s strange game to use as a launching pad for my Giant Bomb writing, I’m determined to write about Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds as this review became my sole motivation for completing it after all of the others vanished from my interest. It’s a strange game because if someone would’ve told me a year ago that I’d be a big fan of both “Buffy” and “Angel”, I would’ve been quite surprised as it’s not really a “cool” show by definition or something you can easily discuss proudly offline. I could not have foreseen a friend busting out Firefly one night and it acting as a personal gateway to The Whedon Zone. This lead to slow torrent acquisition and clandestine DVD swaps with someone at school who was concerned with her reputation as much as I was with mine. Many months later, I’d finally absorbed everything both Buffy and Angel have to offer in the form of television and wished to explore the Buffyverse beyond those 186 hours. A chance find, ten dollars and mildly embarrassing transaction at EB Games made more so by a friend as a witness yielded Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds. Was the reward worthy of the trials I went through that Sunday afternoon? The game has low points and high points, but those high points are few, far between and not even close to approaching something that would attract a non-fan.
Upon starting a new game, the player is met with the Scooby Gang (as the characters become known throughout the show due to their early escapades with the mystery monsters-of-the-week) performing the, by this point, common task of fending off waves of vampires from their headquarters, the local magic shop. As it turns out, a past villain from the show orchestrated the attack and there are even more re-appearing characters and areas in store. This cheapens the game and really makes it feel like an aside, which it is, rather than a real episode. The story continues to a point where all the characters are split up, showcasing Chaos Bleeds’ selling point of multiple characters.
The lukewarm direct-to-video story is wrapped around a fairly simple 3D brawler. There are three character types with what one could call unique gameplay qualities. Xander, Spike and Sid the Dummy don’t have any outstanding powers or abilities; they are outfitted with the basic punch/kick/jump/block moveset. The small exception is Sid, being an animated ventriloquism dummy, is half the size of other characters and can charge from a distance. This isn’t enough to separate him from the vanilla character group, though. Buffy and Faith are an improvement on the previous group because of their extensive and useless repertoire of Slayer kicks, flips and backhands. Finally, Willow employs spells in lieu of physical strength and defers the most from the generic formula for the genre.
In each level, the player is assigned one of the characters and given a clear objective, which involves finding something or someone. Standing in the way are vampires, demons, zombies and other creatures of the night. Killing these hordes of evil is pretty standard fare. They are either beaten until they melt into a pile of ooze, like zombies, or beaten until they require being finished off with a stake or fire, like vampires. Vampire disposal is certainly one thing Chaos Bleeds has going for it. Stakes can be, just like in the show, improvised out of crates, chairs and other loose wooden objects by breaking them. Other weapons that can be used for general abuse, like shovels or baseball bats, can be flipped around and used for dusting purposes as well. To assist with staking, the game has a Quick Stake button, which swaps out the current weapon for a stake from the inventory and stabs. Fire appears in the form of bottled Hellfire and Holy Water. These are pickups hidden throughout the areas. To counterbalance vampires’ conditional invincibility, enemies are also required to kill the player with a finishing move once their health has been completely emptied. Other weaponry includes things like swords, battleaxes and Holy Water guns.
If the game were limited to this, it would be a truly lost cause. A surprising aspect of Chaos Bleeds is the integration of puzzles. The early ones really seem like something to be written off, “use A on B to open C” and so on. However, they soon evolve into a logical application of common household objects or other strange things you may pick up. This is reminiscent of the golden age of point and click adventure games, if much more implied by limited options. The problem with this is that instead of walking circles around the colorful kingdom of Daventry exhausting every option, the backtracking is done in the dark, repetitive, uninteresting locales of nighttime Sunnydale. This is complemented by constantly re-spawning vampires and a soundtrack comprised of silence interspersed with dramatic music during fights. The experience of slogging through dank corridors impeded by endless enemies to either run-of-the-mill movie score stuff or none music at all is most of what the game is. This, avoiding a vampire pun, blows.
What is left to save Chaos Bleeds? The presentation is, of course. Unfortunately, it fails to do that. As previously mentioned, the music and environments are uninspired. The enemies are the expected abominations: vampires, zombies, gorgon creatures, etc. The voice acting from the show’s actual actors is just fine, as well as the performance by the Sarah Michelle Gellar sound-alike, but the Alyson Hannigan substitute is quite off-putting. I encountered several strange glitches in cutscenes where there were audio sync problems or entire lines of dialog would just be absent. This is tolerable, but another mark against a game that’s already weak in other areas.
For the masochist who wishes to get the most out of this game, there are bonus features that can be unlocked (interviews with the cast and characters/levels for the poorly conceived multiplayer modes). Each level takes about an hour the first time through and can be revisited to find secrets and achieve a better rank/time. The game’s difficulty hovers around manageable with small frustrating bursts. It becomes hard if the player allows himself to be surrounded, as single monster combat is a breeze. A map for the occasional large, similar looking level would’ve been a nice touch.
Chaos Bleeds functions as two things: an installment in the Buffy storyline (although it’s not considered canon, I don’t believe it contradicts anything) and a video game. It doesn’t do either of these things incredibly well. The writing is second-rate and the gameplay ranges from playable to near torturous. However, there are small highlights to cling to, like the comeback of the super campy Initiative and ADAM. The game feels complete, but it just isn’t very enjoyable.