Blood Running Review - An Extraction Shooter for the Casual Player

Blood Running was an interesting experience for me and during my time with it I found myself on a bit of a roller coaster of highs and lows. It’s a top down extraction shooter set in a post apocalyptic sci fi world, so naturally I’m thinking hell yeah, how did this fly under my radar? Well I’m sad to say that while I did have a lot fun with the game, it’s also immediately apparent that it has some serious issues. Right off the bat I found myself not only disappointed, but downright annoyed with some of it’s design decisions. There’s a serious lack of quality of life features, balance issues, major bugs like items disappearing from your inventory and some absolutely insulting time sinks within it’s inventory management. I could actually let a lot of this slide, but one thing that kept gnawing at me was how derivative it is of zero sievert. Some features and systems are not only similar, but seemingly directly copied right down to the UI and in many cases handled much worse. What’s more confusing to me is why would you take so much from zero sievert and then strip away all the quality of life functions in the process? Listen, I get that these indie extraction games are all essentially trying to condense something like escape from Tarkov down, so there’s bound to be similarities, but Blood Running feels like a game lacking it’s own identity. Sure it’s got a unique art style, but even that mostly reminded me of hyper light drifter mixed with risk of rain.

Despite all of that, I still found myself having some mindless fun with the game, so mindless that I think I had even more fun reflecting on design philosophy as I played. I kept experiencing major whiplash going from very much disliking the game to really enjoying it. For example the initial impression of the gun play is absolutely terrible, recoil is so random and virtually uncontrollable. Throw in high enemy density and it feels almost completely untested, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the game’s often refunded, that’s how bad it’s first impression was. Then after a zero to hero pistol run, I realized just how piss easy the game actually is, with easily exploitable AI, an abundance of supplies and comically imbalanced bullet damage. There’s also so little depth to it’s gun play that most nearly every encounter is won by spraying across the screen, regardless of bullet type. Almost every initial positive reception I had to a design, like the abundance of supplies or the faster run and gun style of shooting, would slowly turn negative as I realized how it cheapened the overall game loop. Seriously, I find myself having a hard time determining where Blood Running lands, a lot of it’s design results in a much more casual extraction shooter that I do think a lot of people will enjoy, but I’m not convinced they’ll stick around long enough to fully experience it. I’m also not sure if there’s enough depth here for any regulars within this genre, especially those that have already played Zero Sievert. So it may come as a surprise to hear that since the game is only 15 bucks, I found it was fun enough to feel like the money was well spent, despite all it’s flaws. I’m just not sure it’ll attract the audience it’s trying to appeal to, let alone who that audience even is.

To fully express the roller coaster of emotion I went through I think it’s best to just walk you through my own experience in the game. So to start you create your character, it’s simple but always a welcome addition. You choose your difficulty, which doesn’t really say much about what changes other than hardcore drops all items on death, the only way to play an extraction shooter, so of course that’s what I chose. But I do wish the game had more options to adjust specific things like damage, loot abundance and vendor pricing for example, then finally you choose from one of three starting loadouts. Pretty standard stuff we’ve all seen before I’m sure. You then get an opening text setting the stage for the story, it’s your standard post apocalyptic stuff. It’s the future, civilization fell, worlds in ruins and anarchy is the way of life. You’re a Blade, I mean Blood Runner that goes into the ruined world for that fat loot son. Let’s face it you don’t play these for the story, but it does it’s job preparing us for the world.

At last you find yourself in the hub, which is an outpost consisting of a surprising amount of NPC’s to talk to. There’s several vendors doubling as quest givers, it actually caught me by surprise and at first I really liked it. There’s plenty of quests to accept including some repeatable dailies which is also a nice touch. Completing the quests rewards you with experience and cash of course, but also reputation with the NPC that rewards tokens, which can then be spent on things like equipment or a shop discount. This is all fine and good, but navigating this place over and over is a time sink. While it is a straight forward layout, there’s no way to teleport to each NPC. After a few raids I was sick of running around turning in quests, shopping or running all the way up to my hideout to sleep. Believe me, it’s just one of the many small time sinks built into this game and it desperately needs a teleport function.

So, since it doesn’t display who might have a new quest on the map, you’ve now ran around speaking to every NPC filling up your log and finally you’re ready to go on a blood run. You equip your loadout which besides a cybernetic augment is your standard fare, an armor set, backpack, primary and secondary weapons. You’ll need to bring along some ammo, medical supplies, and potentially a big lunch. When you’re ready you speak to an NPC that will take you to one of 4 maps, each with a distinct biome, dropping you off in a random location. The maps themselves seem fairly randomly generated, with your quests and extraction points marked on the map.

On my first run I was happy to see so many quests spread out so widely on the map, movement and aiming felt snappy and frankly like I was back in Zero Sievert. Then I encountered my first group of enemies and experienced the really bad gunplay first hand. Bullets recoil wildly unless you really slow down to let the reticule bloom subside, it’s like your arms are wet noodles. There’s also often groups of enemies very close to each other as the random building placement can sometimes place whole villages side by side to one another. My initial impression was so poor, I myself paused to think if I wanted to refund the game. Shooting guns just isn’t satisfying if you feel like you have no control over them. Then you go to loot and find that it’s missing some very basic features like a hotkey to equip on click, having to cycle through pages of nearby containers from the loot menu and being unable to swap items with a drag and drop. This turns the excessive amounts of looting you’ll be doing throughout your playtime into an absolute chore, throw in the insultingly low stack limits on important items or items not stacking properly at all and it’s seriously a nightmare. There’s also next to no soundscape in the game, there’s no audio cues from enemies like footsteps, some of the sound mixing from the robotic enemies and animals is way off and I personally found all the in raid background music to be repetitive and grating. I’m sorry but it really sounds like someone just learned FL studio like an hour ago. It’s only 15 minutes into the game and my enjoyment fell off a cliff, I did manage to survive the first run, but I was thoroughly unimpressed.

On the next run I died to a bounty mark, which is basically a boss. They have a ton of health and are seemingly more aggressive with better sight range, but are ultimately just another standard enemy on crack. Given the setting of this game, I really wish this is where it tried to be more unique and got creative with the bosses. Big cybernetic monstrosities or real mini bosses with unique mechanics feel like an obvious choice here. So anyways, after that first death I took my last set of gear out and died to the gun accuracy feeling like downright complete shit. I was seriously ready to quit at this point, but I wanted to give the game a fair chance since this was still only like an hour of playtime. Now I had no gear and selling everything I had wouldn’t give me enough money for the cheapest pistol and ammo. Also to my surprise there’s no comeback mechanic. I can’t do a scav run like Tarkov nor can I speak to someone and get a free handout because I’m broke like in Zero Sievert, at least I couldn’t find it. So I set out to do a naked run for any loose loot I could get, the maps are small so if I could just get out with a few items I should be able to buy a pistol. By the end of it I was able to afford the cheapest pistol and crappy armor for the next run.

Here is where the game really turned around for me, zero to hero pistol runs are always exciting in extraction shooters and here it was no different. I immediately killed an enemy, earning me a real gun, a backpack and some supplies. More importantly from playing so timidly I figured out the way you’re meant to play this game, back pedal and spray. You’re literally unstoppable as most enemies won’t ever even engage you from their short sight lines. There’s also no real penalty for long distance shots regardless of ammo or armor like in zero sievert, so you can light enemies up even off screen with 9x19 ammo. There’s also no real limit to your vision, you can see enemies behind you and even behind buildings or trees, so it’s hard to get jumped. For a few hours the game got really fun, I’d go in and absolutely mow down villages of enemies. Because of their numbers, I always had a surplus of supplies like ammo, meds and food. My initial reaction to this was very positive, an extraction shooter that showers you with the essentials is a welcome change. It really didn’t matter what I went in with, after the first 60 seconds I’d have a whole pack of bodies at my feet ripe for looting. After several more runs of clearing quests and effortlessly unlocking the other maps, the ease of the game was beginning to be it’s biggest issue. There’s next to no challenge here, especially for veterans of the genre who are coming into these kinds of games expecting a certain game loop you don’t find anywhere else. That loop of high risk high reward simply doesn’t exist in Blood Running and whats worse is with it’s severe lack of quality of life features, the over abundance of looting from speed running through the entire map over and over quickly wears on you.

It really got me thinking about what it exactly is I’m looking for in a game like this. Sometimes when playing these I get upset because of how stingy they can be with the essential loot or how an economy can feel too suffocating. Well this game goes in the opposite direction so I should be happy right? Instead I realized that without some of these design decisions, it simply doesn’t feel like an extraction shooter. Instead it’s more like an old school twin stick shooter where you’re just mowing down waves of shit for a high score, sure there’s upgrades to unlock and gear to progress through, but really what’s the point? I can clear an entire raid naked with a pistol. In fact I can seriously legit clear this entire game with any 9x19 ammo almost effortlessly. This is my very first run in the last map which features the hardest enemies, so I went in naked with only a pistol and I mean just look at this, where’s the challenge? Within 2 minutes I have more loot than I know what to do with and since the vendors don’t offer much more than the essentials anyways, any money I earn just kind of sits there.

By the end of unlocking every map and doing most of the linear quest lines which don’t really seem to lead up to anything major that I can see, I felt very indifferent towards all this. While the game absolutely provided me with hours of fun once I figured out it’s flow, it never gave me any sense of challenge after that. All I was doing was hunting down the excessive requirements to upgrade your ridiculously limited stash space, which is the real boss of the game. Really, to all you extraction shooter devs, please stop making hideout progression so painfully slow with insane material requirements. Have some respect for your players time. There is zero reason why it should take several hours just to unlock more storage space in your loot game, shame on you for wasting so much of our time on this kind of bullshit. Besides that what did I really have to grind for? The other hideout upgrades are just going to be cosmetic, not like I need to interact with any of it since a 9 millie and a dream are all I ever need to succeed. I can’t really dump all my money into something super cool either and while the skill tree is a nice addition, it’s all just flat number bonuses that I don’t even need. There’s a weapon mod system I don’t need to interact at all with that’s ripped straight from Zero Sievert and I mean down to the UI. It’s funny because I found it pretty clunky even there so I’d hope that here they’d improve upon it, not just copy it. It’s somehow worse though since you need all the items on your person to craft or modify anything, yet another inexcusable sin.

There’s just so little reason to interact with what’s here, even the actual unique features fall to the sidelines. Like there’s a weather system that can affect enemies sight range, but it just makes it even more of a joke since on a clear sunny day they can’t see you very well anyways. There’s companion bots you can take out on a run with you once you build them, this seemed like a really cool addition, but they’re super fragile and take more micromanagement than their worth. It’s easier to just speedrun through the map solo. There’s also the cybernetic augmentations that give you an active ability you can use like slamming the ground to deal damage, increasing gun accuracy for like 3 seconds or a dodge. This is a cool idea, but I found the only remotely useful one to be the dodge and again, what do I need it for anyways? I can just run backwards and easily kill everything. Or how about a disguise system where you can wear a full suit of faction armor to blend in with an enemy, only there’s zero reason to do this. No quests ask you to do it, no areas are locked behind it and it’s far easier to kill anything that moves without question.

The game just constantly let me down and it’s really frustrating because there’s absolutely some fun to be had here, the devs just shot themselves in the foot with bad decision after bad decision. From the really poor balancing to the absent quality of life stuff that makes it hard to believe this game even had an early access, I’m genuinely confused about how none of this was picked up on. I understand wanting a more casual experience, but you can’t sacrifice so much of the game play loop in the process. There’s also the fact that they clearly take inspiration from Zero Sievert, a bit too much if you ask me and still fumble some very basic things or pay no attention to the more nuanced systems. Again I was playing on the highest difficulty and after the first hour there was absolutely zero challenge to be found, it was almost like I was playing the original Robotron, which hell even those games get hard as fuck.

Yet still, there’s always something satisfying about dropping in with nothing but a pistol and wiping a map. There’s that undeniable satisfaction of min maxing your inventory space and making it out with 200,000 credits of loot, even if you can’t spend it on anything good. Monkey brain simply likes clicking excessively and looting shit, it’s a fact of these games and if you’re like me then you know exactly what I’m talking about. At the very least this game provides you with all of that, the dropping in, the shooting, the looting, the getting the fuck outta there alive, spending excessively long sorting your stupidly small stash, farming the one item you need 100’s of just so you can store more crap you don’t need, it’s really all here and for a very reasonable price of 15 dollars.

Man I’m so torn on this one because I do think that the majority of my problems with it can be fixed with patches, but I really wish the devs had left it in the early access oven for a bit longer. However if they keep putting in the work to improve the game, it can become a very easy positive recommendation from me later on. As it stands now, I think that if you’ve been on the sidelines of trying out these extraction shooters because they’re too difficult, this ones the one to get. You’ll have hours of fun mindlessly mowing enemies down and looting endless junk once you get your bearings. It gives you all the essential extraction shooter fundamentals you need to get your feet wet. For fans of this genre that come from the big boy games or even Zero Sievert, well I’d wager you already know if you’re interested in the game just from watching some gameplay, but honestly right now I couldn’t recommend it to you. There’s just not enough depth, substance or uniqueness here and you’re instead better off returning to your favorite title in the genre. I do encourage you to follow it though and wait to see if the developer continues to put in the work it needs, because it has the potential to offer something new in the space, but only time will tell if it ever gets there.