Lifeblood (PC) Review

 

Lifeblood is a mix of a Fantasy MMORPG and a Battle Royale game. It has the UI of an MMORPG with a taskbar of different abilities and attacks, and it focuses on gathering of resources and crafting, but all of that within the context of a Battle Royale match. The gameplay had a lot of similarities with MMORPGs and looks in some aspects like a prototype for Shadow Arena. That being said this MMORPG gameplay style will obviously also draw players away and I personally don't really believe it is best fit for a BR game.

Lifeblood allows players to choose between four different classes (Berserker, Spellslinger, Assassin or Ranger), which come with different abilities. Players however can individualize their role by using different weapons or armour sets. The game aims for a team focus by allowing abilities of different players to be combined in order to be more effective. The only playable mode was therefore Trio, but the devs were planning to also implement Solos and non-BR modes as well. The game world consisted mostly of a large forest area with some individual rocks and houses in it. The environment overall looked decently nice, but did lack details and some areas were also way too empty. As a starting point however it probably did get the job done.

The aspects, which were most praised were the character creator (which apparently offered a lot of options) and the crafting system, where you had to gather resources from the environment to forge armours or weapons.

Some of the biggest weakspots of the game on the hand were the clunky movement in combat and the awful framerate (20 FPS or less in combat) and constant motion blur of the game. The performance was really not stable and probably scared most players away (in combination with the 12 Euro asking price for a very Early Access game).

The game always had a problem to maintain a playerbase. All-time peak was 18 and a month after release Lifeblood never got more than 1-2 concurrent players. Only around 3 months after release (in January 2019) Lifeblood already had to close down the servers permanently due to low player numbers and connected financial reasons. The shady part is, that the game is still being sold on the Steam store. According to the devs there is nothing they can do to remove it from Steam, even though I have seen many other Steam games being removed after server shutdowns...

 

Result:

The idea of mixing Fantasy MMORPG and Battle Royale was not bad, but Lifeblood didn't manage to execute it in the best way. The game had potential, but few people even tried it out and most of them were probably scared away by the awful performance and clunky movement. MMORPGs with skill bars and a strong focus on crafting and resource collecting will probably never become mainstream in the BR genre, but Lifeblood could have certainly been more successful with a better execution.

 

3.5/10