Blood Drive Review

I’m a bit amazed at myself for sitting through and playing Blood Drive – mainly because anyone else who tries this game out will want to drive over the game disc in agony. Blood Drive is a ridiculous game that has no real weight to it, thanks in part to its flimsy controls and boring gameplay.

I think there’s some sort of story behind the game, but I was so comatose during the first fifteen minutes of gameplay that I’ve forgotten it all. To cut to the chase, it’s set in yet another post-apocalyptic setting where (you guessed it) zombies are roaming free. And apparently the best thing to do is to round up some other racers and drive over zombies, something that is both marginally rewarding and incredibly repetitive. The game lets you choose from a roster of bizarre racers, each with their own ‘unique’ car. Each car is then fitted with a specific weapon, and you have everything from railguns to rockets to saws to choose from. You can also choose to equip your car with specific powerups before the race, such as double ammo or extra armor, but this hardly proves to be of much use. While you can cause a fair bit of delicious damage with your weapons, the frustrations arise when you attempt to drive through one of the many arenas.          Since each car is designed differently, they also handle differently. Some cars will veer and flip over at the slightest nudge, while others have difficulties in pulling off even the simplest turns. As you zigzag through the level and attempt to accumulate some sort of score, you’ll find that despite your best efforts it’s almost impossible to drive in a straight line without turning your car into a pile of smoldering wreckage.

The game attempts to add some variety by representing each arena as a cup challenge; clear each cup and you’ll advance to the next arena. While the first challenge was a simple zombie run to rack up the most bodies, the second one was a ‘checkpoint challenge’, where the objective is to race through colored pillars of light that are scattered through the arena. This challenge in particular turned out to be the hardest, simply because some of the checkpoints were in obscure locations which made them almost impossible to reach without losing your position. Then there are other modes where you have to destroy the most cars or some other variation, but in the end it all comes down to a mediocre game with hardly any enjoyment to it. Blood Drive does have a multiplayer mode available, but it’s the same recycled concept with a few more modes kicked in. What’s worse is that after waiting twenty minutes in multiplayer, I still couldn’t find anyone to play with except the AI – this isn’t surprising as I don’t think anyone in their right mind would buy this game.

The game doesn’t pull off anything fancy in the audio and visual department either. Sure, the sound of running over zombies might be great, but that’s the game’s only highlight – the roaming zombies frequently clip in areas of the levels, explosion effects aren’t that great, and the level design is far from original. There’s just nothing here that would keep you playing for very long – everything from the bland execution to the crap controls just screams ‘mediocre’.

Blood Drive is an unimpressive game that doesn’t deliver on any levels, and will fail to keep your attention for very long. While the idea of mixing zombies and cars may have seemed like a brainwave at the time, it has turned out to be an utterly disappointing hybrid that is doomed to fail.