Blood: Fresh Supply (PC)

With a name like Blood, you already know going into this first-person shooter that there’s going to be an ample love for violence on display. There are obviously going to be plenty of blood sprays, but you get more dedicated touches like enemy heads persisting after their deaths so you can kick them around and almost every enemy type has specific animations for when they are electrocuted or roasted to death. What you might not expect though is how playful Blood is. Filled with very direct references to horror films like recreating areas from The Shining, a level called Crystal Lake that blatantly uses the distinct music from the Friday the 13th series, and its mostly intimidating undead hero Caleb chanting that he wants to see Jojo the Idiot Circus Boy perform, you start to see that Blood just revels in whatever it wants to be with an enthusiasm that can be a bit infectious even if its tastes aren’t your cup of tea.

 

Blood: Fresh Supply is the 2019 remaster of the 1997 shooter Blood, although 2025 would see a more recent remaster called Blood: Refreshed Supply to bring the game to consoles as well. The game’s hero Caleb isn’t actually much of one, instead once happily serving the demon Tchernobog. However, the demon one day turns on him and his fellow high ranking cult members, including the woman he seemingly loves Ophelia. While they can’t save themselves from being captured or killed by Tchernobog’s servants, Caleb gets a chance at revenge as he rises from his grave and seeks out the beasts responsible for his death, fighting his way through the cult across a surprisingly wide range of locations as he builds his power for the final confrontation. Despite looking like a gun-toting undertaker with glowing red eyes, Caleb is the kind of guy to laugh maniacally as he hurls dynamite around, to freak out at his own reflection, and say a corny joke when he finds a bloody scene or causes one himself. There are certainly going to be levels that feel like dark and deadly spaces filled with foes to provide a challenge rather than an interesting sight, but Caleb keeps the game’s less serious tone alive no matter where he finds himself.

 

However, Blood: Fresh Supply gets off to a pretty rough start with its campaign, Caleb’s rise out of his grave leaving him with only a pitchfork to defend himself. If you start off on the game’s standard difficulty Lightly Broiled, the first zombie that comes at you takes a lot more stabs to kill than you might expect. You’d hope that you’d get some new guns soon and before the first level is over you will, but not really with the amount of ammunition that lets you easily swap over to fighting mostly with firearms. The pitchfork unfortunately feels like it has to stick around for a while as you face more of the axe-swinging zombies, whittling them down as they try to move in close part of some rather rough necessary ammunition conservation. Bafflingly, should you die in a level, you’ll also be reset down to your pitchfork even though many levels are clearly built around you having better firepower, but the game saves itself from being obnoxious with the ability to make saves any time so you can at least make your own checkpoints to avoid that brutal punishment.

Using the pitchfork never gets better or more interesting, but as you start to broaden your weapon range, especially after the game’s first boss, you’ll start to get quite an arsenal whose advantages you come to know well, even if some aren’t very forward with explaining their function. The Flare Gun is able to roast many standard enemies after a shot sticks to them for a while, good for firing and fleeing. The standard workhorse shotgun doesn’t need to carry all the regular fighting once you get Tommy Guns for chewing through enemies quickly or the Tesla Cannon for more powerful rapid fire shots. Dynamite bundles can be lit and thrown, its blast smaller than it seems but still great for catching foes who haven’t seen you by surprise. The aerosol can and lighter combo is a nice tool for clearing out smaller foes like spiders, but some tools start to feel a little redundant or unclear in their use. A few explosive variants can be used for setting up traps, but the Life Leech staff feel more like it has no strong niche and the poor feedback for stabbing a voodoo doll can mask how strong and long range its effects can be. Ammo distribution will make you explore the corners of your arsenal if not always for the best reasons, but it is at least a varied tool set where you do get a good bit of thrill from smart dynamite use or mowing down foes when you can justify using the more powerful weapons more often. Some power-ups can also be found, things like brief invisibility or boots you can activate to jump high and sometimes make your own paths through a level. However the Beast Vision is underwhelming when it just makes things slightly easier to see in the dark and Guns Akimbo, while fitting for the power fantasy side of things, can chew through valuable ammo so it tinges the fun with some wastefulness.

 

Most of the weapons save the pitchfork can be enjoyable tools to use, but sometimes the enemies you face push against your capabilities rather poorly. The most common foe you’ll face in Blood: Fresh Supply are Cultists. Cultists can come in different types that determine their weapons, many of their tools similar to yours like Tommy guns and shotguns. However, what makes them fiendish is their frequent reliance on hitscan confirmation for their shots. Hitscan means the moment they attack, the game will run a check to see if they hit, meaning it’s not something you can actively dodge like the magic blasts of a gargoyle or the flames of a charging hell hound. You want to be out of their line of sight to avoid the hitscan shots, but the game seems to know they’re pesky and dangerous and hides them in devious places or puts them in large groups so you might only see them right as they fire and tear a chunk out of your life. Healing and armor aren’t kept too far out of reach, but cultists are very common and can sometimes deal a good chunk of your health bar before you even realize they’re there. You end up having to approach many levels very carefully for fear they’re there, especially since Blood: Fresh Supply has no qualms against having walls behind you open to reveal enemies or large spaces with many floors where enemies can fire down on you from plenty of angles.

 

The cultists will probably make you a regular user of quick saving and quick loading simply to learn the level layout, the ambush attacks from such accurate foes necessitating such a safety net if you don’t want to replay full levels far too often. There are some tricks to overcoming them, like crouching delaying their firing a tad. Of course knowing they’re there is the best way to overcome them which isn’t always an option until you’ve learned the hard way, but thankfully there are other enemies to make it so levels can throw some other dangers at you that won’t require such games. Some of the boss enemies do feel like they take a lot of punishment to put down despite having very basic attacks like just unleashing constant streams of spider minions or the upgraded gargoyle firing blue blasts at you as it flies around, and difficulty changing doesn’t necessarily fix this. Bosses still take a lot to kill if you knock the difficulty down a bit, but funnily enough, the cultists seem like they become too easy to handle, Blood: Fresh Supply not really having a sweet spot for their competency.

Level design can make up for where enemies sometimes fail though, often spacing things out so you don’t get overwhelmed or can better handle the careful approach forward. The focus on the cult of Tchernobog does mean there are times you’ll explore more appropriate spaces like profane cathedrals, a castle, dark dungeons, and buildings filled with butchered bodies. At the same time, as mentioned, Blood likes to play around, and it creates many unique spaces to explore that don’t get too caught up on being devoted to the gothic horror elements. The second level of the game has you exploring a train station with many shops, the fourth level takes place at a carnival, and you’ll climb aboard a few boats across the journey or even explore malls as you go from the game’s main campaign to the extra two expansions Post Mortem from the Plasma Pak and Cryptic Passage. Some levels can be a touch confusing, hiding grey buttons or brown switches on dark surfaces or even just having whatever such things open only do so briefly despite it not always being clear what they are even opening. At the same time, a good deal of levels are packed with secrets, these often requiring you to notice odd bits of level geometry where opening the hidden doors can lead to very appreciated stores of ammo and other helpful items. There are even super secrets, secret levels, and levels can often have split routes where sometimes approaching from one direction lets you blast monsters and cultists in the back since they were watching the wrong door.

 

Blood: Fresh Supply’s levels are more the stars than the enemies, and they can at least keep the foes reined in some by making it manageable to press on cautiously and ready to fire. There is some appeal to that tension of knowing what lies ahead is truly dangerous and needs to be respected, and while most enemies outside cultists often lean on simpler projectiles or rushing you, they do spread out the type of action you find yourself in and can suit different level designs better like the gargoyles who are a good fit for the larger open spaces. Blood: Fresh Supply can be approached with up to seven co-op partners though to take some of the sting out of it, the tides surely turning if you can get such a group together, but a smaller team might better be able to have each other’s back without it becoming utter chaos.

 

The competitive multiplayer is rather chaotic even with just a few players though, Blood having a pretty fast movement speed that doesn’t always get to shine in its often tight campaign level spaces. The multiplayer maps have the familiar weapons from the story strewn about to grab and turn on each other in Bloodbath contests to get the most kills, respawns quick as well so people can be zipping around and unleashing the power of the game’s strong weapons rather rapidly. Napalm cannons making short work of people or dynamite raining down in droves has its own frenetic appeal especially in small groups, but much like Quake and it’s zippy multiplayer action, this first-person shooter’s lack of weapon reloading and quick time to die can almost make it feel like you’re facing a high speed version of the cultist enemies. It feels a little more fair when it’s a human getting the drop on you though, and Blood: Fresh Supply in particular includes a lot of extra multiplayer maps so you can pick ones that might better suit long range combat or close up scrambles. It’s a nice way to keep the action going, but with Blood’s original campaign already holding over 40 maps before you factor in the extra two expansions and there being so many secrets to find throughout them all, the campaign play holds things together well enough that multiplayer can afford to be a fairly frantic bonus feature.

THE VERDICT: Blood: Fresh Supply revels not just in the bloodshed but in an abundance of helpful secrets to uncover, corny quips, and references to other media. You head to a wide range of level types on your cultist shooting rampage, but those cultists are also one thing that holds back this shooter from truly being a violent delight. Cultists are placed deliberately to catch you off-guard with cheap shots and some of the game’s tougher foes really drag on as even your strongest guns take a while to wear them down, but at least other standard foes spread out those moments of frustration and your arsenal grows into a nice toolkit for cautiously approaching the dangers ahead. The carefulness needed to tackle the difficulty feels a little odd with how playful the tone and imaginative level designs can be, but you can still appreciate the action in this remaster once you learn what to expect and how to approach it.

 

And so, I give Blood: Fresh Supply for PC…

An OKAY rating. The placement and competency of the cultists isn’t really the type of difficulty that allows for you to overcome it purely with player skill, and that drags down an experience that otherwise has a mostly good set of monsters, weapons, and levels. Perhaps the cultists could take the hit of being fairly weak like in the lower difficulties with everything else remaining tough, but Blood: Fresh Supply does have a few other little points that don’t feel like they contribute to a challenging shooter. Bosses are plenty tough thanks to high damage output so they don’t need to be so durable and the buttons and switches could afford to be a bit more visible, but the level themes do help with making exploring interesting, especially when they also come hand in hand with instances of better enemy placement. Aboard the train you can expect a lot of cultist ambushes or rooms full of them so it’s hard to even poke in and land shots, but the carnival is a bit more consistent in letting you approach cautiously and work your way through foes. Swimming can feel a little sloppy, but the underwater foes don’t strain the movement so it won’t slow things down much. Blood: Fresh Supply doesn’t look like it wants to touch the blueprints of the original or its expansions too much though, the remaster more a means of putting the game on more modern PC hardware, but even the current state of the difficulty won’t diminish how interesting the weapon set can be to manage or how fun it can be to see the game’s more playful elements.

 

For an old-school shooter, Blood isn’t as compelling as Doom or Quake, but as befitting its sometimes playful secrets, jokes, and inclusion of elements seemingly just because they seem cool, fun, or different, it is a nice alternate flavor even if that comes with less accomplished developers taking the wheel. There’s some understanding of the thrill in a level space that works well for exploration and shooting, but having some brutal difficulty also feels like what fans of this genre might develop because they’ve played other similar shooters to death. Blood, whether you play the original, Fresh Supply, or Refreshed Supply, will have its moments because of the willingness to follow a fun idea with the game’s design even if its nearing borderline copyright infringement or something that might seem a little goofy in a game that can also put together atmospheric and grisly moments too.