Bloodforge is a third person combat XBLA game developed by Climax Group set in an ancient Celtic world.  I for one feel sorry for the Celts if this is what their world looked like - a drab black/grey/white land, which is splashed with lots of the claret stuff.

You take Crom on a revenge quest to seek out the things responsible for making him kill his own wife – there is a cutscene at the beginning of the game that explains all this.  Crom is an angry man, as you will tell throughout the game as he yells everything he says in each cutscene, poor bugger must have needed a fair few strepsils to go with his gallons of blood.

In essence the game is a hack and slash adventure, with room for the more determined to master some combos.  You have ‘A’ as your jump button, ‘X’ is your standard melee attack, ‘Y’ is the strong melee, and ‘B’ is the ranged attacks.  These can be combined in different ways for different effects – there is a list of combos in the pause menu.  Each weapon brings with it its own set of moves, keeping the game slightly fresh during the more often than not repetitive combat.

Combined with the regular moves, you can harness your collected blood to unleash ‘Rage’ which slows things down somewhat and lets you move around faster, dealing a bit more damage with each hit.  You can also use ‘mana’ to unleash a god move (these are unlocked along the way by sacrificing blood you have collected at alters) which massively swings the tide of a fight in your favour.  The mana can also be used for more powerful normal attacks by holding the right trigger while you swing your weapon.  There is no block button as such, but an evade button (left trigger), which you’ll need to get familiar with, as a few hits from the larger enemies will mean dying and going back to a checkpoint – which can be a fair stretch back at times.

The game’s camera is very clunky and not easy to control.  While you run the camera can bounce along, and you can try and adjust with the right stick, it quickly snaps back to somewhere behind the character.  In a busy battle against multiple enemies I couldn’t really see what was going on so button mashing took over in a frenzied attempt to get past the area.  It would have also been useful to have some kind of mini map to provide direction on where you’re going.  Numerous times I found myself going round in circles due to each route looking so similar, so a little hint as to where I was meant to be going would have been nice.

The potential for a decent game is there, but unfortunately the whole thing gets extremely repetitive quickly, leading to a dull game that drags along.  There are some lovely killing moves - all of which results in sprays of blood, and slicing limbs (sometime chopping someone completely in half) was exciting at first, but the moves  are soon exhausted.  As previously mentioned there are more than one type of weapon in the game, I found myself coming back to the sword time after time as the others didn’t quite feel right to me, and the crossbow is next to useless against the majority of enemies.  And while I thought the boss fights would lead to an exciting time in the game, I found them extremely monotonous with the game only providing one tactic to take them down.

A big selling point for this game is the amount of blood/gore on offer.  The blood in even more pronounced due to the lack of colour in the landscape.  If you are a hack and slash fan looking for a quick game to take your mind off things then this could be a great little game for you.  But for me, it’s a game that I may pick up and have a quick go of while there is nothing else to do.  It’s not a story that grabbed me at all, and it’s stuff that has been seen before.  5/10

Bloodforge is available now on XBLA for 1200MP.