Bloodforge is, seemingly, Microsoft Studio’s answer to God of War. Crom is their Kratos and the gameplay is much the same but far, far less evolved, so is the story. Yet another tale of revenge for some prophesied reason blah blah blah killed his wife. There’s even copious amounts of blood in the game. In fact, that’s the currency in the game, blood, and deaths. The blood lets you achieve berserker rage and the style points for hit combos let you buy shift attack of a sort. The shift attacks also require an extremely limited energy and you can only hold enough energy for ten such attacks.

The combat system is immature, there’s no lock on to enemies and no blocking and it feels like you’re fighting through molasses at times. Perhaps that was the desired effect, hoping for a more fast and loose combat mechanic, but it just comes off as frustrating and when Crom move out of combat and continues attacking open air you start wondering why you’re still playing the game.

Aside from combat, there’s nothing else to do in the game. There are no puzzles to solve or anything aside from a lot of walking from point to point and attacking enemies to reach bosses. When you do reach the bosses you’ll have to find their pattern and then beat them using it. The cheapest of these was one that simply required you to keep your distance and continually fire your crossbow until they died. With no lock on, as previously mentioned, and a lack of a reticle for aiming, it takes longer than it should. Of course, the lack of reticle for a crossbow isn’t all that annoying, but the camera angle sometimes makes it hard to aim precisely and that is annoying.

When you finally go into berserker rage you have basically one shot at doing a one-hit kill on a big enemy. If you manage to initiate it, then it’s a mindless, and pointless, button mash to complete it. At least it’s just one button you need to mash repeatedly instead of an intricate series of them. After a while though, the only reason to pull these attacks off, is to speed up that particular combat sequence.