It’s 2022 and there’s a new Battle Royale on the field. I thought games had explored pretty much everything worth doing in the circle-shrinking genre, but then I started running up walls and drinking civilians up like juices in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt. “This free-to-play Battle Royale is pretty good!” I say to my friends who respectfully will not download it to play with me.
Bloodhunt was launched on Steam in Early Access last year when I was not watching, but it came out in earnest last week. The vampire name will definitely throw fans off the original Bloodlines RPG from 2004. This is not it. Bloodhunt uses Vampire’s world as a vampire-to-vampire showdown with 45 players on the streets of Prague, and so far quite well.
I’m really impressed with how well developer Sharkmob has gotten to the basics here – weapons are powerful and easy to aim, jumping, sliding and climbing walls are smooth, and my class vampire powers immediately feel useful. I’m only a few fights so far, but I may have found a favorite in The Saboteur, a slippery vamp that can place gas traps and pouf in a cloud of smoke to lighten away from bad situations.
I also like the little details that set Bloodhunt apart from the crowded BR space. Players can feed the blood of wandering civilians to get passive bonuses like health rains or melee damage boosts. Running down the street blood sucking as if there is no morning sounded like a good idea at first until I realized you are being severely punished for letting a human catch you in the process of eating – this “breaks the masquerade” and highlights you temporarily on-screen for all to see.
When I first saw Bloodhunt’s hopping on the roof and high-mobility firefights, I got a little nervous about going into a rerun of Ubisoft’s forgotten Hyper Scape battle royale. In that game, players could move so fast and get so high that tracking a single kill was like pulling teeth. I have not had the same issues with Bloodhunt so far. The high FOV on Bloodhunt’s third-person camera makes tracking airborne targets a bit easier, and I suppose hitboxes are more generous, too. In the long to medium range, I’ve already had some fun back and forth matches sticking out of the coverage looking for head shots.
Many fights, however, seem to end up close, and this is where the action can get a little too hectic. Like Fortnite, there is a lot of jumping and shaking aiming, while two people try to set up a shotgun or track a gentle stream of SMG bullets at each other. This is where vampire cracks can get in the way – each class seems to have an ability to help them engage in or free themselves from a fight. In my last fight, I ran against an enemy with a shotgun until they forcibly pushed me 100 feet backwards.
Bloodhunt has enough cool stuff going on that I’m surprised it also feels the need to copy a lot of other battle royale mechanics that immerse an otherwise airy game. You will spend a lot of time putting on new armor plates on or taking cover to desperately ingest “blood bag” medkits. Fortunately, there are no juggling attachments or backpacks to handle.
I enjoy Bloodhunt in the same way that I have enjoyed the occasional battle in Fortnites Zero Build mode the last few weeks. A low-stakes shooting game with light shooting and fun moves is an effective palate cleanser for a night of intense Hunt: Showdown battles. I will continue to join it alone until I get tired of solo mode and my teammates disappoint me.
I bet Bloodhunt would be even more fun with friends, but as with Fortnite, I doubt I will ever succeed in getting two friends to try it with me. “Free-to-play battle royale” has become a non-starter with my group of friends and I can not really blame them. It’s exhausting to jump into another game with a different meta and a different loot system and yet another battle pass with a different roadmap.
Blood hunting could be an easier sale if it were not yet another circle-shrinker. These days, my friends and I have been more interested in what comes after Battle Royale. I appreciate that Sharkmob probably started the development when book-standard Battle Royale was at its peak, but hopefully it realizes that Bloodhunt could also excel as a PvPvE “extraction royale” type game that cuts some of the annoying randomness out of BR. I would also turn up for a full co-op mode against AI, or basically any other implementation of Bloodhunt’s strong foundation.
That said, Bloodhunt seems to have gotten off to a good start without the help of my group of friends. It reached a new high of 25,000 concurrent players today on Steam. Given that it’s only one of three platforms it’s on, Bloodhunt may be there for a while.