Developed By: Monolith Software
Published By: NightDive Studios
Date of Release: May 9, 2019
Price: $9.99
The first time I played Blood was way back in the summer of '97. I was 12 at the time, and well versed in the ways of the FPS. I had blasted my way through Wolfenstein 3D, the Dooms, Quake, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D... I thought I had seen it all. Then along came blood to blow everything out of the water with it's own macabre brand of fun. Sure, it was the same Build Engine that powered Duke Nukem 3D, but gone were the bright comic-book inspired locations and brightly lit urban environments. Gone were the hilarious one-liners and pop culture jokes. Gone were the invading alien bastards and their plans for enslaving earth. Taking their place were dark, dank and decrepit mortuaries, monasteries, and mausoleums, the aliens replaced with zombies and beasts and raving cultists. The morbid ambiance flowed sanguine like the fresh blood that would soon be spilled. It was time to paint the town red!
It only took me a level or two to realize that Blood had just as many snappy one-liners and wink wink, nudge nudge moments as Duke Nukem 3D, they were just a much more subtle and darker brand of humor. The references to classic horror abounded, oozing out of every crevice in the complex and brilliantly designed levels. The main character, Caleb, was decidedly a connoisseur of the arts as well, as he spouts wonderful references to classic films and Shakespearean plays, and if you let him idle for a while he'll start singing some improv showtunes. There's a brilliantly moody midi soundtrack that sets the tone wonderfully, but if you leave the game CD in the drive you'd be treated to a chillingly ambient soundtrack, with haunting choirs and chanting cultists. With Blood, the bar had been raised far over the precedents set by Duke Nukem 3D, and in my humble opinion serves as the epitome of what makes a Build game good.
So here we are 22 years later. Blood has been out for a while on Steam and GoG, but it's just the original DOS version running in a wrapper, and that's all well and good, if slightly underwhelming in terms of presentation. But what if it could be MORE? Well Night Dive Studios certainly took that into consideration, as they had Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal rework the entire game and port it to his amazing KEX engine, which is the backbone of many other Night Dive re-releases such as Turok 1+2, System Shock Enhanced, Forsaken, and Strife. The result is Blood: Fresh Supply, a smooth amalgamation of the classic DOS gameplay with a host of modern conveniences such as newer graphics API support, high resolutions, and so on. They ripped out the heart of what made Blood so good back in the day and resurrected it in a new body, so to speak.
So how IS Blood: Fresh Supply? To sum it up simply, a breath of fresh death. Sure, there are a couple of other ports for blood like BloodGDX and nBlood, but neither of those come as a preconfigured plug and play package the way Fresh Supply does, not to mention BloodGDX still has some rather glaring frame-pacing issues. Fresh Supply on the other hand runs smooth as butter, supports DX11, OpenGL, and Vulkan rendering, has added ambient occlusion to make the environments THAT much more moody, and also doesn't fall apart when you turn on vsync. It also supports optional true 3D aiming and allows you to also turn off autoaim, which makes wasting cultists that much more satisfying. On top of that the multiplayer has been revamped with new netcode, and splitscreen play. Both the MIDI and CD soundtrack are included, and controller support has been added too so you can kick back on the couch and blast the baddies on the big screen. Night Dive is also working on squashing any bugs that crawl out of the woodwork, with a dedicated channel on their Discord where players can submit reports. When it comes right down to it, the previous no-frills release of Blood packed with DosBox was just a drop in the bucket.
Blood: Fresh Supply is the full transfusion.
