REVIEW: ‘Captain Blood’ Is Not The Buried Treasure You Seek

The most interesting thing about Captain Blood is its story, and I don’t mean the game’s swashbuckling narrative. The development of Captain Blood began way back in 2003 with the help of Postal developer Akella. It was an adaptation of Rafael Sabatini’s 1920s historical fiction novels of the same name. It went through numerous reboots in development and corporate restructurings until a lawsuit in 2010 saw it indefinitely shelved. Then, in 2022, the game’s source code was leaked to a few torrent sites, and is now being fully released by publisher SNEG after some final development by General Arcade.

Captain Blood is a hack-and-slash pirate adventure that eschews the grounded realism of its source material for over-the-top video game action complete with switchblade dagger gauntlets and automatic cannon turrets. It was originally intended to be released for the original Xbox before being pushed back to the Xbox 360.

Now, releasing on current gen, it is important to keep that timeframe in mind because while some final development was done to prepare it for this release, the game’s design is firmly rooted in the timeframe of its origin.  Captain Blood is a 2006 game, but unfortunately, it isn’t a very good one.

The game follows the titular character in 1685 Spanish Main, a stoic and absurdly jacked pirate whose only passion is killing people with his two cutlasses. Captain Blood is ultimately a black hole of personality. In one of the game’s multiple opening cutscenes, he mentions getting a job to make some gold, but it is unclear what he wants the gold for. Before he can say anything else about it, the Spanish attack the British colony he is in, and Captain Blood embarks on a ruthless, bloodthirsty killing spree for the rest of the game without much motivation or interest.

Captain Blood winds up just being uninteresting.

Beyond his combat abilities, there is nothing to Captain Blood as a character. Does he find anything funny? Is he angry about having to kill scores of Spaniards? Does he enjoy being a pirate, or was he pushed into it by an overbearing father with high expectations that he still tries to please as a grown adult? I have no idea. Even the mute protagonist of Sid Meier’s Pirates! had more personality.

Thankfully, Captain Blood fares a little better in its gameplay, but only a little. Combat in Captain Blood is a relatively standard affair. Equipped with two swords, the player has light and heavy attacks that can be performed in different orders to complete some simple combos. They also have a pistol that they can shoot at enemies and cause them to ragdoll away for a second as a handy stun.

Players can also pick up grenades throughout the levels to deal massive damage to groups of enemies. Players can also pick up short-term power weapons like rapiers or muskets and have executions that instantly kill weaker enemies and finish off stronger ones. From damaging enemies, players also fill a Rage meter that can be activated to buff their damage for a limited time.

Captain Blood is a standard 2006 hack-and-slash, and it plays like it. The problems start to arise in the minutiae, as many minor issues pop up so frequently that they build and build to spoil the adequate foundation. This mountain of negatives turns the game into an exercise of seeing which level can irritate the player the fastest. The devil is in the details, and in Captain Blood, he has a presence in just about every scene.

The audio is so poorly mixed that you can hardly hear what anyone says. Subtitles can only be toggled on from the main menu. Cutscenes are laden with distracting visual issues. Many animations have sound effects that trigger either too many times or not enough.

Poorly mixed audio, thin writing, and frustrating combat design keep Captain Blood stuck in the early aughts.

After the first mission or two combat encounters, the game bombards players with so many enemies that getting hit a single time can lead to an infinite combo from multiple angles that traps the player into death, especially if you ever make the mistake of being near a corner. Add in that the player can seemingly still be hit while dodge rolling, and fighting through the absurdly large swathes of Spaniards quickly becomes a chore, only worsened by all the small issues that should have been ironed out in its final development before release.

For example, the player is highly encouraged to use executions on enemies as they are fast, protect them from enemy damage for a short time, and can be used to regain resources like Rage or a power weapon. But if you are using Rage for a damage boost and executing an enemy, your Rage does not stop draining and will be fully depleted by the time the animation is done.

Or there is one of the first levels where the player has to use an automatic cannon turret to destroy incoming enemy ships. The only problem is that one of those ships, which you can’t shoot, destroy, or impede in any way, keeps shooting at the player on the turret. So, for the entire turret section, you are repeatedly getting kicked off the turret by an explosion and have to watch Captain Blood haul himself back up before jumping back on the turret to keep shooting.

I tried everything I could to avoid this, and it is impossible. You cannot stop the ship from shooting at you. You cannot shoot the incoming cannonball from the air. By the time you see the shot coming, it is too late, and you cannot jump off the turret to avoid it. You can only suffer through.

This game winds up boring at best and frustrating at worst.

Every level has some major annoyance like this built into it. Whether it is a boring and lengthy boss fight with no checkpoints, or a naval battle that sees the player running around a ship to shoot cannons at ships as they slowly circle you and cover your deck in explosions. Every single one feels underbaked and undertuned, and the worst part is a frequent bug I ran into when retrying sections after failing them.

Frequently, when doing so, the game would glitch and not allow me to progress even after killing all the enemies, leaving me stranded in a ghost town of a level, waiting for it to continue. The only solution I found for it was quitting to the menu and loading back in, having to play through the often laborious section all over again.

I wanted to like Captain Blood. A throwback title without the modern faff that comes with so many newer releases was refreshing, as was returning to the period of my childhood playing games in such an authentic way. The preservation of video games is also a critically important and sorely lacking aspect of the industry, so seeing a seemingly vanished project get a second chance at life seemed great.

Still, Captain Blood‘s lacking design and poor tuning make it an absolute chore to play through. It quickly wears through any goodwill or nostalgia it might have benefited from and ultimately has very little going for it. The story is boring, and its characters are as flat as the pixels used to display them. Its gameplay is more frustrating than fun, and it is so rife with little issues that they add up to make one of the most unpleasant gaming experiences in recent memory.

Captain Blood is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.