Chaos Bleeds: A Review

It’s inevitable, I suppose, that every successful television franchise must have some type of spin-off video game.

That said, there are going to be some shows that better lend themselves to the video game spin-off than others.   I can see the point of actually wanting to participate in a game of Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune, but I have yet to see why anyone would want to play a video game version of reality shows such as Survivor or American Idol. (Not that I don’t like them, but I just can’t imagine the video game version would be that entertaining.)

Genre shows seem to generate their own special place in the video game world—probably because most of us who watch them dream of somehow getting into that world and exploring it a bit more.  After all, it’s entertaining to watch the various Star Trek crews battle the Borg, but how much more fun is it to get in there and actual do battle with the assimilated monsters yourself, via Elite Force?

Last year, gamers got the chance to enter Joss Whedon’s universe with the X-Box’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.   The game was a success—both in sales and fan response, leading to this year’s sequel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds.

Chaos Bleeds is set during season five of Buffy—after the events of “Forever” but before “Intervention”—and plays like a lost episode of from that season.   Ethan Rayne has made a deal with the First and the result is that Buffy and company must now battle a whole plethora of demonic creatures—from new foes to old faces—in order to stop the inevitable chaos.

Now, I’ll be honest here—I have never played the original Buffy game, so I can’t tell you if this one is worse, better or on par with that one.  I will also add that for review purposes, I played the X-Box version of this game, but from what I understand in my research, the game is pretty much the same no matter which platform you choose to play.

The most important question that one must ask when it comes to playing a video game is—is the game any fun?  The answer to this one is a resounding yes.

The game is set up so that you get to play as one of several characters—Buffy, Xander, Willow, Faith, Spike and Sid the Dummy (from season one’s “Puppet Show”).   Though you spend a majority of the time battling as Buffy, getting to change characters from time to time makes for a welcome change of pace.  Each character has his or her own strengths and weaknesses—and I’ll be honest, I preferred playing Buffy, Spike and Willow due to such issues as Buffy and Spike moved the fastest and Willow had all kinds of interesting spells to use in attacking the hordes of vampires that are after you.

Game play is that of a third-person perspective seen in such games as Tomb Raider or Unreal.  You have an inventory that can include weapons (and there is quite a variety of good ones here, including my personal favorite, the shovel), hell fire, holy water, stakes, med packs, your Slayer handbook (it gives you combinations of key punches for certain moves and/or spells in the case of Willow) and other items that you find along the way, in order to solve the puzzles.  One of my first complaints is how limited you are in what you can carry—apparently five of each item is too many.  This isn’t too bad, except for the fact that stakes wear down and eventually run out of life, thus disappearing from your inventory.  If you’re in a full battle with lots of vamps this could get annoying quickly, if you run out of stakes or are forced to run around and create more.  Also, having to toggle to certain things like the med pack or the hell fire in the course of a battle can be distracting and led to my dying in mid-battle on more than one occasion.  (But whether or not these are flaws in the game or flaws in my skill as a game player, I will leave up to you to decide.)

As for the rest of the game play, it’s pretty much your standard kill all the bad guys, solve the puzzles mold that a lot of games these days takes.   It’s not ground breaking, but I’m not sure it really needs to be.  Yes, some of the puzzles are a bit mystifying when you first encounter them and you may be tempted to run for the inevitable walkthrough on-line, but overall, they’re just challenging enough to keep the game interesting without being overly frustrating.  (Though you may develop a dimple in your forehead from slapping your hand against it and going “Ohhhhhh! So that’s how that works!” by the time the game is over.)

Along those lines, the levels are also very nicely set up and visually quite striking.  There were several moments in the game where I just sat back and enjoyed the time and effort the designers put into re-creating the Joss-niverse for us to look around and play in.

For the most part, the characters from the TV show are faithfully (no pun intended) rendered, though some are better than others.  Giles’s head is too big for his body and Faith doesn’t look enough like Eliza Dushku, but otherwise the rest of the cast looks like they should.

It’s just too bad that all of them don’t sound like they should.  One of the selling points of any spin-off game is the ability to get the original cast to provide voices for the game, or at least to get reasonable facsimilies.  As most of you know, Sarah Michelle Gellar declined to participate in the game (she didn’t participate in the last one either) and Allyson Hannigan was working on American Pie 3 and couldn’t get away to do voiceovers for Willow.  While the person chosen to do Buffy’s voice works well enough, the actress used for Willow is no where near what Allyson Hannigan could do.  If anything, it sounds like Willow and Captain Kirk had a love child and that person is providing the voice for Willow.  This wouldn’t necessarily be so bad, because you just ignore the cut scenes, but the game had the quipping that made Buffy so much fun and Willow does more than her fair share.  One quip when Willow finds a secret area on a level gets really old, really fast.

Also, a lot of the in-game dialogue sounds like it’s trying hard to be as witty and intelligent as what we saw in the TV show, but not quite succeeding.  This is one of my main problems with the Buffy novels and why I don’t pick them up as often as other fans.  There are some good one-liners in there—surprisingly enough Xander gets more than his fair share of them—but overall the dialogue not up to the standards of the television show.

One major selling point for any video game these days is replay value and on that point, Chaos Bleeds is hit or miss.  The game is DVD-like with hidden features you can unlock based on finding the secrets on each level and how proficient you are.  So, if you really need to see that Joss Whedon interview that you can unlock in the game, certainly you may need to go back and replay certain sections to do so.  However, once you’ve defeated the game, I’m not sure how eager you’ll be to run back and play the single player mode again.  Not that it’s not fun, but once you know all the SPOILERS and twists and turns, part of the fun is taken out of it.

That said, the multiplayer games more than make up for this.  There are four different multiplayer games included here and each one is fun in its own way.  I had a blast playing against other players in each of these modes.  The multiplayer option is a nice feature and one that would keep me coming back to the game even after I’ve finished up the single-player campaign.

The game also features the ability to do in-game saving, though there are only three slots to do so.  While that’s a strong point, you only get to save at the end of a level and not at continue points, which can be frustrating while playing through the game.  (It also leads to lots of running around and doing the same thing over and over, but hey, that’s common for most video games).  Also, I have to admit the continue points were not as evenly placed as I’d hoped, which means sometimes you are lucky and sometimes, well, you have to start over if you should perish while trying to save the universe as we know it.

Also, another quirk I found while reviewing the game was the copy I had locked up several times, thus leading to some swearing and tearing out of my hair.  I’m not sure if this is a universal bug or not, but I bring it up as a warning to all of you gaming fans out there.

But, overall, Chaos Bleeds is an enjoyable and entertaining video game.       It’s not ground breaking, but as I said before, it doesn’t have to be.  With Buffy now only in syndication, it’s a fun way to have a new adventure in the Buffy universe and it’s a pretty entertaining adventure at that. It’s got some flaws, yes, but overall I think if you’re having Buffy withdrawals, this is a great way to cure them.

And does anyone else think that an Angel video game might be in order?

Extra:  Spinning-off the spin-off.

As with most things these days, Chaos Bleeds isn’t just a video game—there’s more to the experience.   Dark Horse comics offers up a prequel comic book that sets the stage for the game and there’s even a novelization of the story by James A. Moore.  In looking into the game, I picked up both and I have to say that the quality of both is hit or miss.

Of the two, the comic book adds the most to the overall gaming experience, though my complaints with it are pretty much the same ones I’ve had with the entire Buffy comic book line—the characters just don’t look enough like the characters in the show.  Overall, the story is well done enough and it sets things up so that you feel like you’ve got a bit more backstory into the game before you dive in and start playing.

As for the novel, I can’t say it really impressed me that much.  Part of it may be that having played the game, you know where it’s all going to go and that diminishes some of the fun of having the story unfold on the printed page. But part of it is that writing a novelization of a video game is a difficult thing to do and keep entertaining.  In the game, you  have the moments where you battle a wealth of vampires and are solving puzzles, but they fall flat on the printed page. Couple that with the action slowing down every two to three pages so characters can reflect on what has happened or is going on or remind us of some continuity point from the series and you get a novel that is frustrating to read and hard to get into.  I will give Moore credit for working a lot on the backstory of Ethan and his family and how all this relates to the events in the game, but that point alone isn’t really worth picking up the book.   You can pretty much skip the novel and you’d still enjoy the game just as much.

The comic book, I’d have to say is the more entertaining of the two—and appealingly enough it’s also the cheapest.   You don’t really need either one to enjoy the game any more.  It stands on its own well enough.  But if you’re really looking for a more complete Chaos Bleeds experience, try the comic and skip the novel.