Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds

"A shoddy and unconvincing encounter that plays like something from the dying days of the PS1."

Chaos Bleeds is the latest Buffy game to hit the consoles. I bought it last November for the princely sum of thirty-nine English pounds and ninety-nine English pence. Conventional wisdom for licensed games has always been to count on a crudely constructed, generic release, arbitrarily plastered with whatever branding, symbolism and plot details were considered vaguely relevant by the marketing executives at the software development company. We’ve seen hundreds of shameless examples since gaming tapped into the mainstream in the mid-nineties. The only anomaly one can instantly recall is the irreplaceable N64 classic, GoldenEye.

So, what of Buffy? Well we all love her, that’s for sure. Down the years, and especially in the final season, we forgave her cliché-riddled “pep talk” scenes, and her pseudo-intellectual philosophical musings, sometimes so incredibly trite you’d think they were straight from the typewriter of Tom Clancy. We forgave her because everything else about the show more than made up for it. Having enjoyed the show, I bought this game hoping for a piece of fun. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that I would unquestionably get what I wanted. Indeed, I was buying, not in confidence, but in the hope of getting a nice surprise.

Inevitably, Chaos Bleeds falls short of delivering any joy for mature Buffy fans. From the start, the game reeks of the kind of uninspiring nonsense that has plagued the PS2 and Xbox since their inception. The plot is anything but intriguing. I presume that it was something to do with saving Sunnydale – in other words, what we’d expect on the show, but less than what we’d want from a game. Now this might be acceptable if only the fighting was fun. Astoundingly, however, the developers fall flat on their faces in this, the most crucial element of the game. Play is slow, ponderous, even tedious. Buffy (and all the other playable characters) can punch, kick, run and do your standard combos, but it’s all so hideously slow that it isn’t even worth bothering with. This is one of the central aspects of the show, and you’d expect it to be well represented here. Instead, the levels feel like they take weeks to complete. No adrenaline, and no excitement, just a bulky fighting system, common-as-muck “puzzles” and a weary tidal wave of pedestrian bad guys. The in-game music is unremarkable, and the sounds are downright annoying. The cut-scenes feature the voices of the actors from the show. With the rhythm and timing of a car salesman's first try on a drumkit, the CPU blithely cuts in with these recorded lines, and if you’re in a good mood it can be quite amusing. If you’re not, it’s torture.

The assault gets worse during gameplay, when your character tries to pull off “witty” one-liners in certain events, for instance, when you kill a random henchman. I don’t even remember laughing at any of these, but that’s besides the point, as no joke is funny when it’s repeated several times in one half-hour sitting of a video game. In fact, the idea of putting these in is something I found to be quite tasteless and childish, and in its frequency it reminded me of those emboldened, underlined words they use to separate paragraphs in gossipy tabloids.

All told, Chaos Bleeds serves as an example of the state of certain parts of the gaming industry today. Half-baked sequels and failed sagas come and go as predictably as the seasons. Companies will do anything to try and create artificial hype as they struggle to inspire hardcore gamers with their unimaginative compositions.

An eleven-year-old might enjoy this game. For everybody else, it just proves that churning out a cheap video game for your merchandise empire is as easy today as starting your own twenty-four hour cable channel.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/18/04