Bloodstroke is John Woo’s first attempt at a mobile game, and after playing it I can only hope it’s his last.
Maybe it wasn’t the director of Broken Arrow and Faceoff that the game needed but the writers.
From what I can tell from the 14 levels I wandered through, the storyline places you as an ex-fighter pilot turned translator who turned out to be so good at killing that he got trained up in it. You have to escort a scientist from location to location to work out why people are trying to kill him. Maybe the full storyline was lost in the constant begging for you to spend real life cash from the game studio.
When I say constant I’m unfortunately not exaggerating. When selecting a mission you get an upgrades box, on the loading screen you get messages about upgrading your gear. The loading screens seem rather long on my Nexus 7 for the quick and simple gameplay maybe so the text is up a bit longer than strictly needed. While in game you can even buy health for your scientist guys. If you fail in a mission you can pay to be revived. Once you finish a mission you get a message saying ‘Well done, now upgrade your stuff’ followed by yet more pop ups in the mission selection UI saying ‘Upgrade!’. I’m sure most people won’t need to ever spend any money in game but I would gladly pay £2 to remove the begging.
As I said before the gameplay is simple, requiring you to get from location to location while making sure your scientist doesn’t die. While he has very limited health, you have a magical red coat of invulnerability (a far cry from Star Trek). The only changes level to level are what gangs are trying to kill you and the slowly improving range of guns they use. To take on these guys you get a long range weapon and a close combat weapon that gives 3 times more points than the ranged equivalent. It almost turns into pinball darting from enemy to enemy with your sword. Only reason to redo levels is to get more in game cash to upgrade your weapons and the scientist’s health.
This game doesn’t have Google Play services so you won’t know how well you are doing against your friends. It does a have a Facebook sign in button but due to not having a Facebook account I can’t see how helpful that is. You get achievements but these are in game and dont go towards your Google Play level so I saw no reason to really look into them.
The only redeeming feature of this game is the unique art style. Everything is done in watercolour brush strokes in Frank Miller grey scale.
This incredibly average game really could have been something great with some simple changes. Moving achievements into Play services, tone down the begging or making the game free would be a good start. Bulking out the storyline and getting enemies to drop items so you have a bit more to think about during levels would also help significantly.
There are many games I would recommend over this in the genre of running around killing people for points, including Minigore 2 and Deadtrigger 2. I could be wrong on this though as it currently has a solid 4.1 on the Play Store. Maybe abuse the Play Store 15 minute return window to find out for yourself.
