Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds
To every (platform) generation, a Slayer is born…
Tags: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Oct 5th, 2003
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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When the platform wars of the current generation began, Microsoft made one pretty saavy bet: wrapping up platform exclusivity on the first-ever Buffy the Vampire Slayer videogame. The thought was, Buffy-lovers would be fanatic enough to forego a PS2 in favor of an Xbox, to get their dose of Sarah Michelle Gellar-inspired slayage.
While it worked to a degree, it wasn’t enough for Xbox to beat back PS2 and unless you owned a beefy PC or an Xbox, you were shut out of the Buffy goodness. This time out, there’s no advantage to be gained by making Buffy Xbox-exclusive and money to be lost if it were, so Vivendi Universal chose to make the second Buffy game, Chaos Bleeds, a multiplatform release. Good choice!
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The first Buffy game was solid but drew some criticism for being a little generic; in Chaos Bleeds, that’s fixed by the involvement of Buffy creator Joss Whedon as well as Buffy comic book writers Christopher Golden and Tom Sniegoski. Instead of a developer-created storyline, Chaos Bleeds is crafted as a “lost episode” from Season Five. The choice of Season Five is nearly ideal; it takes place before the death of Buffy’s mom or Tara. Faith and Anya are around but not Angel, the latter likely due to licensing issues. And the storyline is exciting because it fits into Season Five’s overall continuity.
Although clearly not chock-full of the extended character interaction that makes a TV episode of Buffy so good, there is a lot of dialogue and plenty of cut-scenes that create the feel of a story beyond the current “level” you’re battling in. The action goes at a steady pace and the learning curve and difficulty level escalate just right for the average gamer.
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The graphics are sharper and more detailed than in the first Xbox Buffy game, thanks in large part to a much more sophisticated game engine this time out. The characters are all distinctive enough to be immediately recognizable, something not always easy to pull off. And while there’s only so much variety to be had in the confines of “Sunnydale at night,” it’s unlikely Buffy fans are going to complain. Plus, the game makes good use of the set pieces available to it within the confines of the Buffy-verse.
The concept of the game is pretty fun; Hellmouth-inspired weirdness is opening up dimensional rifts between Sunnydale and “alternate parallel universes,” rifts that could create a lot of havoc and potential world-destruction. This relatively simply plot device makes story-sense in the Buffyverse but allows developers the freedom to bring back all sorts of past enemies of Buffy in a way that fits within the continuity of the TV show, rather than ignoring it.
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What makes playing Choas Bleeds really appealing, however, is not that the game is reinventing the wheel (there have been plenty of action-adventure games out there on the market, after all). Instead, the appeal comes from the freshness of the concept compared to other action-adventure games. In a lot of ways, Chaos Bleeds stands in the shadow cast by the original Tomb Raider; from 3D level design to basic progression, Chaos Bleeds is structured similarly to most modern adventure games that cloned the Tomb Raider concept.
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Buffy outdoes Lara at her own game: exchange the twin pistols for stakes and the tomb-dwellers with vampires and demons and the two games are strikingly similar. Even so, Chaos Bleeds succeeds at many of the goals Angel of Darkness failed to achieve.
Core Design promised to make Lara edgier and darker in tone, taking the character to new places, but in the process made Ms. Croft unsympathetic and uninspiring. The creators of Chaos Bleeds have seven years of TV episodes and comic books under their belts and know how to keep Buffy both tough and sympathetic, mostly through the use of humor and vulnerability, two qualities Lara Croft lacked in Angel of Darkness.
Even after seven years of Buffy [That's if you discount the movie. - Ed.] within American pop culture, there’s still something cool about a hot blonde slaying the undead and despite other supernatural and vampire-inspired games on the market, such as Blade, Legacy of Kain and a handful of others, nothing beats the original: Buffy is still the queen of slayage and Chaos Bleeds has improved enough over the original Xbox game to really do her justice, no matter which platform you play the game on.
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The DVD-style extras are a bonus pleasure for Buffy fans; as you progress through the game, you unlock interviews with original cast members, all of whom added voice work to the game, except for the notable absence of Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy. While not really adding to the gameplay themselves, the interviews are a draw for series loyalists and reward playing the game through to its conclusion.
While Eurocom and Vivendi Universal may not have the sheer skill of Capcom, on display in similarly-themed titles like Devil May Cry and Resident Evil and so forth, or Konami with Silent Hill, they have done their job well enough to make Buffy a fun game that will win over fans and even draw some folks who may not have watched Buffy but like this style of game.
The multiplayer experience is an interesting sidelight but the game is actually most fun, and plays most smoothly, as a one-player experience, especially from a storyline point of view. The action and number of enemies to defeat amps up with extra players but just isn’t as intriguing. The lack of an online play option is, frankly, a relief since it likely freed the developers off to make the single-player experience the best it could possibly be. Not all games have to be online playable, you know. Many that are, shouldn’t be. But that’s just this reviewer’s personal slant.
Now, don’t get me wrong; Chaos Bleeds is hardly a perfect game. The typical little niggling details, such as collision detection, have room for improvement. But the camera work is solid and rarely puts you in a blind spot, fighting enemies you can’t see, and that’s something.
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What Chaos Bleeds is, is a very good, very solid example of an adventure game that does enough things right to be free from “bad game design headaches” and improves in so many ways over the first Buffy game, it’s almost not recognizable. It delivers the goods in a way the GBA Buffy game didn’t even approach.
Evolving from a generic action game trading on Buffy concepts and the Buffy license the first time out to a sharply-delivered game that works because of the licensed property its drawn from rather than in spite of it, BtVS: Chaos Bleeds does for TV-licensed videogames what Activision’s Spider-Man did for comic book-inspired videogames: it proves a licensed game doesn’t HAVE to suck. Unless, of course, the suckage has to do with blood plasma, not gameplay!
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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-- Intriguing story with familiar characters delivers on “feels like an episode” promise -- Great voice work from nearly all original cast members, expect SMG. -- Solid level design with great gameplay mechanics -- Spot-on dialogue, with trademark Buffy humor -- Nice set of fanboy-catering DVD extras -- It’s Buffy! -- Sharp graphics |
8.7 |
| What Doesn't | |
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-- Lack of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s voicework for Buffy -- More story segments might have added something to episodic feel -- Feels a bit like an average episode of Buffy, rather than an outstanding one |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| The hottest TV show of the past seven years now has a game that does it justice … and not just on the limited-audience Xbox! BTVS: Chaos Bleeds is everything Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness should have been, but wasn’t. | |
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Tags: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Oct 5th, 2003 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
