Captain Blood Review. A slice of the Xbox 360 era

Bethesda barely brought us back to 2006 with the Oblivion remaster when another relic from the 2000s suddenly resurfaced. Captain Blood is a legendary hack-and-slash long-hauler that came just a little short of release in 2010 and disappeared from the industry's radar along with its development team. And now, 22 years after development began, the game has unexpectedly been officially released. Of course, it's a somewhat odd launch, since four years ago a finished and playable build of Captain Blood was leaked online, and practically every gamer who wanted to touch this «Russian game dev» relic did so back then. In any case, we've tried the final version of the product and were once again convinced: the Russian gaming industry really did have colossal potential, capable of making it a market leader—if not for the devastating blow of the 2008 financial crisis.

It's hard to believe that Captain Blood began development way back in 2003. The project was handled by the well-known company Akella, which, even before Postal 3 and Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey, was trying to conquer the console market. This was supposed to be the most «user-friendly» version of Sea Dogs, but with the plot of the famous adventure novel Captain Blood: His Odyssey. Most of the game time, players were to take part in naval battles and close-quarters skirmishes in linear locations. Sort of like Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, but without the open world and map markers.

The new ambitious project was supposed to come out on the original Xbox and PC. But due to constant staff and lead designer turnover, the game fell into development hell, and eventually the decision was made to start over. Captain Blood: His Odyssey underwent a visual style change, now only distantly resembling Sea Dogs, and the protagonist’s appearance became closer to what we saw at release. The gameplay became more dynamic and brutal. It's obvious the developers were inspired by the God of War series. Unfortunately, just a year later, key developers started leaving the project again, so it was decided to put it on hold until better times.

In 2006, Akella took up the project for a third time from scratch, but this time wanted to finish it. The project’s visual style changed significantly, and the game design was completely built around the Hack and Slash genre. Although, judging by the release version, what the developers ended up with was more of a Beat 'em up — but more on that later. Akella also made a deal with the overseas publisher Playlogic Entertainment to release the game in the North American market. Ultimately, the product was renamed Captain Blood, and its release was scheduled for 2007 on PC and Xbox 360.

But after another year, Akella and Playlogic unexpectedly had a falling out. Shortly before the conflict, Playlogic had won the rights to Ancient Wars: Sparta from the Russian studio World Forge in court, and then tried to pull a similar move with Captain Blood. Most likely, Akella had no desire to spend money on legal battles, so they sold the internal studio responsible for development to 1C. The release was postponed for another year due to a massive staff exodus — almost half of the original team left the office. Until 2010, the remaining employees continued working on the game, after which the master disc with the finished product was handed over to the publisher. However, Captain Blood never made it to store shelves. Playlogic simply went bankrupt exactly one month after receiving the finished build. There are still plenty of rumors online about all sorts of reasons for the cancellation, but the fact remains: the game was simply forgotten.

As a result, Captain Blood just disappeared from the public eye until 2021. You probably know the rest of the story already. The finished build was published online for free download, and a little later, the entire source code appeared as well. And most surprisingly, in 2024, the Polish publisher SNEG announced the official re-release of the game on Steam and consoles.

Captain Blood is a game that should come bundled with its development history, because only in that context does it gain its greatest value. The project outlived both its developer and publisher and could have remained forever as a «ghost» of 2000's game development, but in the end, it finally reached the coveted digital store shelves. Of course, in the 15 years since its original release date, Captain Blood has become seriously outdated technologically, but in terms of gameplay, it's a rare gem with mechanics from the most popular games of the Xbox 360 era.

After three major development reboots, the plot now has little in common with the original book. Captain Peter Blood and his assistant Walt decide to become privateers in the service of the English Crown, and for a hefty reward, are allowed to legally slaughter hordes of Spaniards. But before they can fully plan their grand scheme, the very same Spaniards attack the tavern where our heroes are. This kicks off an epic chase through the harbor, killing crowds of enemies and capturing a ship, complete with the standard late-2000's QTE mechanics. After dealing with the enemies and reclaiming the ship, Blood and his assistant find an English advisor imprisoned in the hold, whose daughter has been kidnapped by pirates. The aristocrat offers the protagonist a deal: rescue his daughter in exchange for a very lucrative privateering contract. Naturally, the protagonist agrees and sets off on his adventure.

What follows is a classic story: visiting a pirate island, storming a fort, betrayal, capturing a governor, boarding a Spanish ship, and of course, a grand assault on Cartagena. The cutscenes look decent even today, and the abundance of brutality and «bold actions» from the main character evoke nostalgia for the days when games were made without any moral or ethical restrictions. The story campaign is completed fairly quickly and doesn't have time to become boring.

Captain Blood is a very cozy and truly pirate-themed game featuring large-scale naval battles, caricatured villains, classic stereotypes (and that's not a minus), and plenty of spectacular scenes. The main story feels like a «B-movie» — it doesn't aim for prestigious awards, but it does its job: it entertains. While playing, we repeatedly thought that such an adventure would be a perfect fit for Sea of Thieves, which has interesting game mechanics but lacks good adventure-driven plots.

Captain Blood is a rather monotonous beat 'em up that wants to be a hack and slash, but due to the developers’ lack of imagination, can’t boast any unique mechanics or situations. For almost the entire game, you’ll be running through linear locations and killing hordes of enemies in a rather limited number of ways. Blood can swing his huge saber quickly and deftly, perform short combos, shoot his pistol, finish off enemies with a single button, and throw grenades. At a certain point, the player can activate a rage mode, just like in the classic God of War trilogy, and mow down crowds of enemies even more effectively without taking any damage.

Despite the overall simplicity of the mechanics and the rather outdated animations in the combat system, Captain Blood plays quite energetically. First, as any good God of War clone should, the game is very brutal: blood splatters across the screen, the main character chops off heads and crushes them with his boot, crocodiles eat villains, and female antagonists don’t go unpunished for their misdeeds. Everything we loved about the Xbox 360 era is here in full. Second, various weapons are scattered around the locations, making the battles more dynamic and varied. Third, despite a modest set of abilities, Blood can upgrade his skills and improve his stats by spending coins collected from defeated enemies, allowing the player to choose their own playstyle: aggressively hack everyone to pieces without looking back, or actively spam dodges and block incoming attacks.

At first, it may seem that Captain Blood is a very simple game. The levels are completed fairly quickly, and the first boss doesn’t pose any threat. But starting from the second location, the difficulty spikes sharply. There, you can no longer just keep pressing the finisher button to defeat all the enemies in one hit. You’ll have to use all of the hero’s combat potential. At some point, there will be so many enemies that they’ll literally trample you and not let you pull off even the simplest combo.

There are only a handful of bosses in the game, but the battles with them are inventive and interesting. Special praise goes to the well-integrated QTEs during fights. Of course, they’re not as cool as the knife fight from Resident Evil 4, but compared to God of War, they’re very respectable. And the final boss is so tough that our hands were tired from all the button-mashing by the end. And yes, since the game was originally developed for the console market, it’s best played on PC with a gamepad.

In addition to endless slaughter across diverse locations, you'll occasionally be entertained with cannon shootouts against ships, navigating traps, and small tasks — like ramming down doors, destroying mortars, wiping out enemy waves, or flipping levers. There aren’t many of these episodes in the game, but they’re nicely woven into the core gameplay and help make the experience less monotonous.

Of course, it’s important to understand that we’re comparing Captain Blood to games of a similar genre from the Xbox 360 era. If you judge the project strictly by modern standards, it’s a solid mid-tier indie title. That’s why, for a new generation of players, the game might seem too outdated, repetitive, and unjustifiably difficult.

Unfortunately, Captain Blood isn’t like wine that only gets better with age. There are plenty of games in the industry that you can easily replay 20–30 years later, but this hack and slash just doesn’t offer a unique experience or that special spark that would make it a must-play for everyone. It’s simply a solid mid-range game, built from everything that was popular among console gamers back then. If it had come out in 2010, it likely would have received warm reviews from the press and positive feedback from players.

Despite its venerable age, Captain Blood has held up well, thanks to the developers’ decision at some point to abandon realistic graphics in favor of stylization. And as we’ve said many times before, stylization doesn’t age. The game looks like a story-driven adventure set in the World of Warcraft universe — which the art director was probably inspired by. At the very least, you can see clear similarities in character design, environmental details, unrealistic proportions, and location geometry.

Everything related to art direction is done at a high level. Special praise goes to the artists who created interesting locations and enemy designs. The game itself is quite short, so visually it never gets boring. Of course, technologically it doesn’t measure up to modern standards, but unlike the leaked build, the full release has no «blurry» filter, and the textures are higher resolution.

There’s nothing to say about optimization — it’s a game from 2010, so it runs perfectly on any setup. We didn’t encounter any lags, bugs, or errors during our entire playthrough.

***

Captain Blood is another «time machine» that gives modern players a chance to dive into late-2000s console gaming. It’s a pretty hardcore hack and slash in a pirate setting, without any unique mechanics or ideas, but even so, it’s fun and energetic to play — even now! The project is fairly short, taking about five hours to complete, and entertains with a clichéd but amusing plot and the kind of over-the-top brutality that was standard for Xbox 360 games.

Most likely, today’s audience won’t appreciate the game, since expectations for releases have changed a lot over the past 22 years. But if it had come out in 2010, as originally planned, it definitely would have found its fans. For us, it’s a relic that clearly shows what the Russian game industry could have achieved if not for the global economic crisis of 2008. But, as we know, history doesn’t deal in what-ifs.