Bloodroots (Xbox Series X)

Bloodroots begins with the death of its main character. In this old frontier story of bloody revenge, Mr. Wolf finds himself betrayed by his gang the Blood Beasts and left for dead at the sight of the massacre of Tarrytown’s innocent civilians. Time passes, snow melts, and soon Mr. Wolf’s body moves once more. Rising like a revenant, Mr. Wolf goes to track down his former gang members, his mind locked on one man in particular who stood with them that day. No matter where he goes now, only four words ever escape Mr. Wolf’s lips: “Where’s Mr. Black Wolf?”.

 

While this single-minded quest for revenge has a protagonist who can’t say much, Bloodroots does actually begin to flesh out the Blood Beasts as you execute your one man slaughter fest. Mr. Wolf’s carnage has him face off with the old members of his gang like the hedonistic Mr. Boar and the excitable psychopath Ms. Bison, the build up to those battles often focused on presenting them as antagonists deserving of the bad end Mr. Wolf has in store for them. However, between stages you sometimes get the chance to speak with the dead and learn more about these characters outside their continued efforts to kill you before you kill them. Mr. Boar seems like the expected piggish rich man his surface appearance easily implies, but despite enjoying his ill-earned money and luxuries, he shows he can think of things beyond money and murder, even showing some regret for how people like Ms. Bison turned out since her bloody carnage seems more a cry for recognition. These fireside chats start to flesh out this twist to the American Old West as well, the player gradually getting an idea of who the Blood Beasts are and how Mr. Wolf fit into the gang as well as why they would betray him. You’ll never get the game trying to make these killers into sympathetic heroes who don’t deserve Mr. Wolf’s fury, but these outlaws aren’t just criminals for the love of it or ones who are only driven by basic motivations.

 

Bloodroots does spend most of its time focused on you killing your way through areas filled with the men who work under the Blood Beasts, this action game focused primarily on cycling between whatever weapons you can grab on site to quickly kill all in your path while also being just as easy to kill yourself. One hit will end Mr. Wolf’s life and force him to restart the current segment of the level, stages often comprised of many small sections where you’ll have to navigate your way forward and eliminate every enemy to unlock the gates to let you head to the next space. These small areas are brimming with weapon options, and Bloodroots has an extensive array of killing tools both reasonable and absurd to grab to wipe out your foes with. Depending on the weapon, it may be used up the moment it makes contact with an enemy while others are given a few uses before they break, but you are rarely given a tool that will last too long and making progress through the cordoned off sections will depend on you figuring out the best path forward to grab, use, and replace the weapons without being empty handed against someone who is just as eager to kill you.

The more typical weapon types you’d expect to be present are often the most durable. A hatchet can be used to kill three men before it’s useless, but some weapons like the twin swords will actually give you a quick dash attack that can be used to tear through an enemy quickly while covering a good deal of ground. Grab a fish though and your attack will slap it down over a man’s head for a sillier and slower kill, but sometimes in battle all you might have nearby to grab is something like a carrot or fence post and you have to make due. Improvised weapons come in all sorts of shapes, but grabbing a ladder not only gives you a special spin attack but a way to launch yourself up into the air to reach higher areas. A lot of creativity comes not only from exactly what might be laying around a level but the secondary effects it could have. Hop in a giant shoe and you can bounce across the heads of your enemies as long as you can keep the combo chain going. Grab the bear traps and you can launch it like a hook shot towards people to pull yourself to their perch. Riding a barrel or hay wagon can smash through the enemies in its path, but if you’re afraid to get close there are items you throw or fire instead. Despite its frontier aesthetics the game isn’t afraid to get a little silly with its world at times, Mr. Wolf able to find things like a lightsaber or energy gun that aren’t even hidden easter eggs, but it’s usually for a fun way to attack foes nearby and you’re much more likely to be using a firework or a musket rather than something that feels completely out of place in this world.

 

The item variety is truly impressive and testing what new weapons can do helps Bloodroots keep some excitement as you get deeper in, but at other times it can feel like straying from reliable tools will just lead to your unfortunate quick demise. Areas are often laid out to have a bit of a line for expected weapon pick-ups, and while figuring out the rhythm of an area in terms of what to grab and how to use it is an interesting test of your problem solving, it also runs into a few issues. Sometimes it can feel like a weapon isn’t swinging as rapidly as it should be, enemies slipping in between a usually reliable tool to instantly kill you. Funnily enough gunmen aren’t too much of a concern, their shots being slow to fire and well indicated by a red line extending out from them so you know it’s coming, but men who run towards you with weapons in hand can sometimes seemingly bypass the swing of your own weapon. This isn’t an overwhelming issue, partly because the tools you use are yours to decide most of the time, but it does start to make that expected flow of killing your way forward in a murder ballet less fluid. The difficulty caused by you going down in one hit is not the heart of the issue, it’s understandable sometimes you will die because you grabbed a bad weapon, but the game isn’t actually pushing you too hard because the enemies are laid out conspicuously for a sequence of kills and that’s why having your rhythm disrupted when this time the enemy managed to land the punch before your swing could come out stands out.

The game tries to add a bit more excitement to the action by capping off an area’s last kill with a slow motion cinematic kill, but the area layouts do feel like they aren’t often providing enough danger. Many men are there to be carved through without concern while the tougher ones will fall like the fodder to one or two blows. Some concepts do come into the mix to help freshen things up though, men wearing pinball bumpers or saws meant to deflect projectiles or discourage melee kills respectively. This is meant to disrupt leaning too much on the tried and true, and deeper in the game Bloodroots does start to put more people like the gunmen together so that even if it’s usually not too much trouble to bait out an easily dodged shot, their different firing rates can put you in a bind. Many enemy types are a bit passive though, waiting until you’re fairly close since they can’t navigate the many cliffs and roofs they way you can and thus they’re left waiting by whatever weapon type is encouraged to wipe out that specific group. It’s not so straightforward that it feels like you’re always just finding the prescribed path immediately, and setting up some guys to be killed in interesting ways ensures you can indulge on the wilder item options laying around the stages. Mr. Wolf is almost too good of a one-man killing machine though and some stiffer opposition feels like it could have drawn more out of the improvised weapon concept rather than it mostly being back-up tools if the better killing options were mishandled.

 

Bloodroots does mix in a few other types of play beyond killing your way through locked off areas full of men and weapons. The boss battles are all a break from the typical fighting form in some manner, dodging becoming a much more important factor than in most fights. Inside the levels themselves though you also get moments where you need to focus more on the way you move, platforming across gaps, over spikes, or around hazardous lasers. While sometimes Bloodroots can show its focus wasn’t on the platforming as it’s easy to throw yourself over an edge with the very same sword dash you were asked to use to navigate, these areas with a lasting threat also break you out of the usual focus on finding the killing line from weapon to victim. You can’t just stand around when sweeping lasers are making certain areas too dangerous to stand in, and needing to hop about using enemy heads to avoid falling in spiked pits makes you think more about how you are using the weapon in hand. Some weapons like the throwing shield or anything that can start a fire are sometimes satisfying because they can interact in special ways as well, the shield bouncing around to hit multiple targets and fire catching on things to potentially incinerate foes you didn’t even need to approach. Spending that time to explore what a weapon can do a bit more makes it more interesting than just carving your way through some passive foes.

 

You do get bonus levels that try to ask you to kill quickly but they don’t make it difficult, but one missed opportunity exists in the hats unlocked for beating levels. These can give you a special edge or effect like a double jump or starting the level with a weapon already, but they can only be used when replaying a stage. While a hat could potentially invalidate a jumping challenge or two, especially for the hidden wolves you need to work to reach, they’d benefit the game more with that extra range of options beyond just using what’s on hand without much lost for it.

THE VERDICT: Bloodroots boasts a wide range of weapons with unique functions, and when a level is spaced well it can create a satisfying string of kills with the strange and unique murdering tools that you’re grabbing as you go. However it’s also very easy to disrupt this string of action when a swing doesn’t seem to come out right and the game can sometimes struggle to have an area put up a decent fight beyond the chance of a foe landing a lucky hit. When it embraces the special functions of certain tools, Bloodroots can focus on an interesting style of play it can properly challenge, but at other times it can seem like things are laid out purely for a specific style rather than letting the player find their own thrilling rhythm with the weapons on hand.

 

And so, I give Bloodroots for Xbox Series X…

An OKAY rating. Bloodroots wants to have a wacky array of items you can use to earn your kills but also doesn’t want to make the massacres more like puzzles. It wants to have a more free form sort of action, but oftentimes a group of baddies are placed to nudge you a little too strongly towards a specific weapon nearby. Hitting someone with a squirrel pelt to kill them is a brief moment of amusement but it will likely get you killed or be too simple to really make you want to pick up other wacky killing implements since they break so quickly and don’t offer the same benefits that the proper weapons nearby can provide. It can still feel satisfying to pull off a string of slick maneuvers to land your kills with a blade, but Bloodroots perhaps shines better when it almost outright forces you to use something like the bear trap to navigate briefly since then it can actually test how you handle that tool. In fact, Bloodroots could have probably worked better as a series of trials for weapons with unique functions to help avoid those shallow moments of carving through fodder. Bloodroots does put in the effort to shake up the design for bosses and the platform sections, as disruptive as they can be, sometimes giving enemies time to change formation and require more responsive play that better matches grabbing what’s nearby rather than what’s obviously meant to be in your path. If it was going to focus on the wide range of weapons though, giving them each room to do more than smack a few baddies could have been the more compelling form of design. As fun as it is to say you killed a guy by throwing a snowball at him, it’s a quick interaction and not much different from throwing other more expected throwing tools, but when the more unique mechanics are added to tools like the bear trap, you get a fighting style that shapes the battle more and thus the game expects more out of how you use it in that moment.

 

Bloodroots’s surprisingly interesting characters definitely give the game some substance beyond the bloodshed, the player seeing how each Blood Beast shaped their slice of the Wild West into something matching their motives that aren’t just two-dimensional excuses on why it’s fine to kill them. However, much more focus was given to the killing sprees on your way to face your former gang members and they aren’t as fleshed out as they could have been to get the most out of the fighting concepts at play. Most of them are going to be fine enough challenges to figure out the quick and clean way to kill your way forward, but the more focused sections show a glimmer of what Bloodroots could be if it was focused more on exploring mechanics rather than giving you brief tastes of a string of weapons laid out just so.