Captain Blood: Things Was Good. Now Things is Bad

Captain Blood is an all-console game that was essentially made in 2009, but came out, as of right now, 4 days ago. It’s not particularly publicised, since it’s such a minor game and has less than 70 reviews on steam at the moment. So, I think the game deserves it. A little blurb about the game that you’ll see on just about any review is that its development history is more interesting than anything pertaining to the game itself. I think that’s a little unfair, but I do get it. So, Akella, a random Russian company known for publishing the postal games making the Sea Dogs trilogy, as well as that Xbox Pirates of the Caribbean game that shouldn’t have been as good as it was, was working on this game around 2003. With the goal that it would come out in 2005. However, the publisher didn’t like the direction the game was going, so they just restarted the whole thing. They split the team in two to make team SeaDog, who would make the second Sea Dogs game, and team SeaWolf who were put onto making this game. But, Playlogic also signed on to publish the game in 2005. If you don’t know, they were a sorta weird game publisher/developer that only lived for 7 years and put out a couple of hidden gems like WorldShift and Obscure II before going full mobile developer and dying a gruesome capitalistic death. Playlogic, as you can tell from barely knowing anything about them, didn’t make smart decisions. So, they restarted the game that was already started less than a year later. In another brilliant move, Playlogic began to have a shit-fight with Akella over who legally owned the rights to making a game based on the Captain Blood movies and novels. Which, yes, this game is technically a licensed game but you definitely wouldn’t know that without the name attachment. So, Akella restructured team SeaWolf into just Sea Wolves, made the team its own distinct developer studio, and sold them down the river to the even more obscure Russian publisher, 1C. Primarily, in the hopes that Playlogic would stop knocking on their door. Then, things just languished for 2 more years as the game had to be totally refitted to be up to snuff for the Xbox 360. In 2008 the game got another trailer and in 2010 it got some marketing, including a website. However, Playlogic ran out of money the same year and asked Sea Wolves if they would be cool with not getting paid, so they walked. 10 years later, some guys from the now defunct Akella and the now defunct C1 got together to make SNEG. SNEG is basically Nightdive but British. If you wanna play any old AD&D games or any of the souls-likes that came out before Demon Souls, they got you. Reminiscing about the old days, the guys remembered that they never did finish Captain Blood and felt like they left something on the table. They got their source code for the game, reacquired the Captain Blood license, and outsourced the project to General Arcade (a studio that just does porting jobs) to solve the technical problems, retool a number of mechanics, and give the game a spit-shine to work on modern systems. After one more trailer in 2024, it came out this year. I personally think that is a way better story than anything the game has to offer. A crew got back together to go on one last voyage and, with some hired help, they just about got this thing out the door. By all accounts this deserved to be a cool game that languished in obscurity for the rest of time, staying vaporware that was 90% done but still never came out. But it exists and can be purchased for a cool $20. Do I think the game is worth that much? Not particularly. Do I regret paying that much for it? Not at all.

The game’s story is what you think it is for a 2005 video game that got crusted and moldy through at least a dozen rewrites. You follow Captain Blood, that’s his real name, and his crew as they tear shit up in the Caribbean. That’s basically it. There are characters besides just him, I don’t really remember them. You save some guy’s boobaful daughter, save the governor, and then you topple a Spanish stronghold by yourself. Then Blood goes “It never was about the money.” Then he sails off into the sunset. This isn’t an anthology piece, all of these things just happen in sequence. Less than a day apart. This is probably what people that don’t like God of War 1 & 2 think those games look like. Everything that happens is there so Blood can get an eyeful of T&A, brutally murder those that oppose him, and look like a stud doing it. Along with that comes some late aughts aesthetics like making every character who isn’t an english speaking white dude either eye-candy or just evil for no particular reason. As well as some weird riffs on JRPGs, like the first-mate character that has a sword-arm-thing that doesn’t match the aesthetic of anything else in the game and a final boss that has multiple phases for no reason I can come up with, since it’s just the same fight twice. Although, on that note, the aesthetics are pretty good just from a vibe standpoint. If I hadn’t played this game and you told me it came out the same week as Fable 2, I’d immediately believe you with zero hesitation. It’s straight up just an early Xbox 360 game with a fan-patch applied to upscale it to 1080p. And, I’m in love with that fact. The game’s oil painted art style works because, in 2005, they knew they didn’t have the budget to make realism age well. Plus, there’s the goofy 3d icons above the enemies’ heads that tell you when to do God of War finishing moves, the health pickups that hover on the ground like Minecraft blocks, and the copious amounts of gore for no reason; It’s all just a vibe that you couldn’t possibly understand if you didn’t grow up in that era. Even the progenitors of this vibe, like Devil May Cry and God of War, have turned away from this era of mixing goofiness and brutality. The first three GoW games, Fable 1-3, Madworld, Darksiders, No More Heroes, so many games that just really linked into the idea of gore combined with very gamey visuals and buckets of whimsy. Impale a guy and use his grenade to splatter his friend against the wall, then vacuum up his hovering, gently rotating, doubloons afterwards so you can unlock another combo. Piracy isn’t the aesthetic, the late 2000’s is. If you go into the game with Assassin’s Creed 4 or Sid Meier’s Pirates on your mind, you’ll be disappointed. The game has as much to do with piracy as Team Fortress 2 has to do with military warfare. It’s just a thing to make it look like the thing so stuff can happen. You’re not getting Edward weeping while holding the corpse of his best friend after she’s faced the consequences of choosing liberty over life. Nor, bringing another ship to heel and carting its wrecked corpse to a French shipwright to sell her for parts and rum. The enemies in the game might as well be shooting you with 1911’s based on their rate of fire. It’s all very silly. That’s totally fine. I think it adds more than it subtracts. Just don’t expect any swagger or swashbuckling. You’re gonna do some nasty combos and like it.

Yeah, the story isn’t great, but the combat is actually quite good. It should be, since that’s the only thing you do outside of a few turret segments. I am serious. There are no puzzles, no platforming sections, and no exploration to speak of. Every level is a claustrophobically linear tunnel that you have to go down with just a few chances to branch off and pop open a chest and steal the loot. The combat is a ton of fun, and it just about has the necessary depth to carry the game’s 6 hour runtime. Definitely on par with the first GoW or Lords of Shadow, but not quite as good as Darksiders since there’s no air combat. The upgrades are a little simple, but it’s appreciated that I can’t upgrade the primary weapon and can only get more health, more finishing moves, and more combos. Normally, I’d be annoyed by not having a secondary weapon, but the game uses the Shadow of Rome system that lets you just pick up anything laying on the floor and use it until it breaks. It seemed useless at first, until I found out that the value of the found weapon is proportional to how hard it is to kill its wielder. The rapiers wielded by fodder enemies are whatever, but the axes and cleavers used by tank enemies do enough damage to 2-shot weaker enemies and the pistoleers, the most annoying enemy in the game, give you dual glocks that just kill anything you point at in under a second. This combined with the fact that you can get finishers that either steal the enemy’s weapon, extra money, or bonus charge on your Devil Trigger meter, gives the game plenty of meat for its short run time. Plus some minor skill-based things like how combos that start with a heavy attack and end with a light will do more damage but you can’t do a finisher in the middle of the combo, and the block move that becomes a parry if you just tap the button right while being hit. Had this game actually come out, as it is, in 2010, I don’t think it would’ve revolutionized the hack-and-slash genre. But, it would’ve definitely been seen as really good for the time.

So, after all that rambling, this game seems like it’s just a pretty good game that came out 15 years too late. Dumpster fire of a plot, only one type of gameplay, and even then the combat is arguably outdone by games that came out the same time this one would have. But, none of that stuff matters to me really. Captain Blood is a lovely little throwback gem that I would’ve played on the PS3 and done nothing else with my whole weekend. This game reminds me of when Capcom, EA, Microsoft, Konami, and Rockstar were happy to take a risk and put out completely original games held together by old gum and the developer’s ambition. From 2000 to 2010, games like Bully, Okami, Fable, Army of Two, Oni, God Hand, Onimusha, Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, Mass Effect, and Def Jam were the norm, while sequels like San Andreas and Silent Hill 3 were treats for the fans. We kept seeing all new projects that the publishers believed in and, since they’d be okay if it bombed, they were happy to go full commitment. Things weren’t perfect, as I said, part of the vibe was just being misogynist and a little unknowingly racist. Gaming wasn’t all that friendly at the time to anyone who wasn’t a male between the ages of 12 and 30. But, considering the current norm is trying to use the interactive medium chemically alter childrens’ brains and force them to gamble, even if it’s literally illegal to do so, I think things were way less dower back in the day. The weird gatekeeping of the medium that was more or less an attitude problem that seems to have thankfully gone away in the last 10 years. But, in return, everything from a major studio is just a sequel or remake to something people already know about, and the only originality we’re getting comes from the underfunded and underappreciated indie teams that just about make ends meet. Because, big studios are just in the domain of One Piece style power creep. They can't de-escalate anymore. When Skull & Bones slid out of Ubisoft’s crusty pipeline, the thing flopped hard. Because of that, I’m almost certain it’ll be years, if not a decade, before they try a new IP that isn’t just “Far Cry or GTA, but slightly different this time”. So I want Captain Blood 2. Give me a PS2 game with all the sensibilities and polish we can give it now. It better have some blurry ass textures and voice acting that’s just decent-to-good and a storyline that shouldn’t be as good as it is. I can feel this game’s future. There needs to be a sequel that’s the absolute best in the series, followed by a third that’s still really good but some people still think the second is better. Then, 10 years later, there needs to be a reboot that’s still a good game but it failed to connect with the fans and we see a retro-revival after that. Then, I’ll feel right at home.