Captain Blood Review (PS5)
Summary: Captain Blood is an action adventure game that fails in its attempt of vindication after already struggling to stay above water. It doesn’t do anything new, exciting, or fun being released in this modern era of gaming and even it’s archaic style and influential takeaways can’t keep it afloat with issues such as audio inconsistencies, bland level structure, vexing enemy A.I., graphical hiccups, and pure negligible combat and upgrade systems. Captain Blood should have been a great comeback story, but has sadly been released with no substance, style, or grace.
1.5
Plunder Blunder
Captain Blood is a pirate-themed hack-and-slash action adventure developed by Seawolf Studio and General Arcade, published by SNEG, and released on May 6th, 2025. The game is notoriously known for its development history which includes a decade-long odyssey through legal limbo and cancellation, only to now resurface as a finished product many assumed would never see the light of day. Unfortunately, this long wait hasn’t translated into quality. What Captain Blood delivers is less of a swashbuckling comeback and more of a cautionary tale; it’s a game stuck in time, both in design and ambition.
Set in the year 1685 on the Spanish Main, Captain Blood follows the exploits of Peter Blood, a well-known pirate who reluctantly accepts a mission to rescue a kidnapped daughter. The first step on this treacherous journey takes him to Dead Reef Pier, an abandoned Spanish fort where the formidable Jack Easterling is stationed. Peter is joined by his loyal first mate, Walt, who players also get to control in some sequences. While the premise promises high seas adventure and classic pirate drama, the execution is anything but gripping. The plot unfolds in a predictable fashion and is only made worse by weak dialogue and a presentation that constantly undercuts its own tone with janky cutscenes and half-baked character interactions.
If you’ve played a God of War clone before, you’ll know exactly what Captain Blood is going for. Playing this on the PlayStation 5, square and triangle are used for basic attacks, circle initiates grabs and executions (which can be purchased and expanded through a shop system), you can perform a classic dodge roll with the right analog stick, and guarding and parry mechanics are present via the cross button. Bigger enemies initiate QTE-style executions, and there’s a Rage Mode (mapped to R1) that temporarily boosts your strength and speed.
Combat offers a range of actions: stealing enemy weapons like muskets and rapiers, using grenades for high-damage bursts, or even picking up crates to hurl at your foes, though these often clip through enemies or bounce off of them harmlessly. Long-range combat exists but is clunky due to painfully slow reloads and poorly balanced gunfire from enemies that stun-lock you from off-screen. Even when you try to get creative with combos, the game punishes you with interruptions, poor hit feedback, and enemies that can’t be hit during certain animations for no apparent reason.
Despite having a wide array of tools at your disposal, Captain Blood stumbles at nearly every step. The combat, while seemingly diverse, quickly devolves into a repetitive slog. You’ll find a few combos you like, but there’s little incentive to experiment further because nothing feels impactful. Gun-toting enemies disrupt your flow constantly with cheap shots and frequently moving too quickly to reasonably react to. There are entire sequences where it feels like the game is actively working against you, be it through input lag, broken object interactions, or bizarre AI behavior where enemies just stand and grunt at each other. Running over to try to pick up an exploding barrel to throw will make you awkwardly slide over and on top of the barrel, making you have to readjust your position to pick it up multiple times and by then, the enemy is already attacking. Cutscenes and other small encounters stiffly place characters looking at each other while snarling, making altercations come off a bit too cheesy and poorly executed.
Ship combat is a potential highlight, but is bizarrely cumbersome. Cannons feel useless because you’re constantly forced to dismount them to dodge enemy fire, which breaks any semblance of rhythm in naval battles. While fighting off enemy ships and getting boarded at the same time sounds like a creative fun challenge, other more modern pirate games have more or less perfected this technique and Captain Blood is seemingly drowning in the past inner workings of its classic styled design in this regard; the entire process of these scenarios feels dragged down, regrettably making them a chore to play through. Captain Blood is full of oddities like this, both technical and design-wise.
The sense of progress is undermined by level design that tricks you with shallow exploration and rewards you with gold that only marginally upgrades your character, without ever fixing the core gameplay issues. While leveling up is always a good thing, whether it’s gaining more health, being able to hold an extra grenade, or learning a new combo, it feels too oversimplified and barebones. The game does provide a decent challenge, you can’t just breeze past everything, but the extra armor that enemies have or the different tiered weight classes you’ll run into never feels threatening, demanding, or compelling by any means.
Visually, Captain Blood has its moments. The environments are occasionally striking, and the character models, especially the titular Blood, look good in still frames. The stylized art direction feels like a nod to the late PS2/early PS3 era, which might be nostalgic for some players. It feels good to go back to this sort of tone in a gaming space where everything is about having the best looking graphics or having the greatest draw distance. Art design-wise, Captain Blood cooks up some good atmosphere with its environmental design and decisions. Unfortunately, that’s where the praise mostly ends. I ran into many different inexcusable anomalies like reflections on the ocean being completely broken, displaying misplaced ship shadows or phantom objects not even in the scene.
The audio design is an outright mess. Dialogue is so quiet it can be missed entirely, especially in cutscenes. Characters endlessly repeat the same voice lines mid-fight, creating a bizarre loop of murmurs and mumbles that destroy any sense of immersion. Worse, strange random noises will trigger like loud beeps, static, and “shifting” sounds that can’t be reproduced consistently, making it feel like the game is glitching rather than conveying any atmosphere. At one point, a jungle bird call sounded like a timed bomb countdown, so I was cautiously looking around for mines or anything of that nature on the ground until I realized it was supposed to be an exotic ambient noise. The sounds of a flowing waterfall right next to you will cut in and out inexplicably. Collecting items triggers overlapping audio cues that clash in your ears. Even boss fights, which should feel climactic, suffer from audio dropouts and awkward silence. Despite some well-done ragdoll physics and amusing dismemberment effects, the game never convinces you it’s polished, because it isn’t.
Final Thoughts?
After ten years of development hell, Captain Blood was supposed to be a swashbuckling redemption story. Instead, it’s a relic of a bygone era, slapped with an HD coat of paint and sent out to sea half-finished. Beneath the nostalgic visuals and momentary combat thrills lies a shallow, repetitive, bug-ridden experience with audio issues that border on parody. For players seeking an unapologetically old-school action game with pirate flair and no modern sensibilities, Captain Blood might scratch a very specific itch. For most, this is one voyage better left scuttled.
About the Author
Nay Clark Gaming holds a special place in my heart and I never stop talking about video games. I really love all types of games and have an interest in games that have complicated stories and lore because I enjoy untangling the mystery of it all. When I'm not gaming, I unsuccessfully try to control three amazing and incredibly bright kids.
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