The first thing that really grabs us with Neon Blood are those visuals. Certainly, other games have mixed pixel art and more realistic lighting and environments (hello Tails games) but there are few that have done it as well as this. Be it running around the streets of Blind City, or exploring the inner areas of a ripperdocs clinic, very few games pull of this much style in every frame. Neon Blood had us pausing to take more screenshots that any other game of recent memory, but it really looks at its best in motion, the lighting playing off of the 2D sprites of the characters incredibly well – themselves wonderfully animated with just enough expression and life to give the small world a lively feel.
Neon Blood is more than just a pretty face mind you. We play as Alex McCoin, a implant-enhanced detective as he looks to track down the murderous Robin Slash; Slash is on the warpath with the city’s techcorps engineers it seems, and he’s been tasked with stopping her. Over the course of roughly 6 hours, the tale in Neon Blood goes from fairly standard cyberpunk fare to something a bit more engaging thanks to some interesting character work and twists (though you’d be hard pressed to be shocked by the big reveals if we’re honest).
As we attempt to solve the mystery behind the murders, we traverse small areas of Blind City and surrounding areas, interacting with characters and fulfilling objectives to progress. We might need a bouncer to step aside for example, but first must complete several odd jobs to rustle up the payment needed. This example is simple enough – there’s only three jobs we can do, and we must do them all – but Neon Blood rarely pushes its luck when it comes to giving us tasks to do. Often, the game will simply be happy to place us in the direct location of where we need to go as to avoid padding things out, and it kept the flow of the gameplay and tale going nicely.
Combat crops up a handful of times throughout and is played in a turn-based style, albeit a very light take on the genre. Alex has only a handful of moves to start with (attack, defend, critical attack) and a low HP meter, but fairly quickly he’s given access to better moves via story-determined upgrades. One allows us to remove the chance for a critical attack at the benefit of healing for the same amount as the damage we do. Once we unlocked this, this was the only attack we needed – at least until the latter third of the game, where we unlocked a defensive move that made us invulnerable for one turn but also dealt massive damage to enemies. We kept expecting it to run out of uses, but the last five or six fights were a breeze as we couldn’t be touched at all. We’re not sure if this was an intentional thing or our game was bugged, but it made the final boss fight in particular a non-issue at all. Hell, there were several other items and skills we unlocked that we never even touched as they were on a cooldown timer, but the win-all button wasn’t.
Occasionally we’re presented with some QTE’s that allow Alex to pull of more elaborate fights and these look tremendous in motion. The cool action shots flow nicely, and it puts those already gorgeous visuals to work with some excellent effects and animation. It’s a bit of a shame we don’t get more if we’re honest, as these were way more fun to play than the turn-based fights, and there was at least a little bit of skill involved. There were definitely a few times where we pressed the wrong prompt only for it to succeed anyway, but that just meant we got to see the next visceral frame, so no real complaints here.
We also ran into a handful of other bugs throughout, from characters not being interactive, dialogue boxes labelled and coloured as the wrong person, and even a couple of times where after talking to an NPC us not getting control back of Alex, forcing us to restart a checkpoint. Luckily these are fairly frequent, but it’s emblematic of the game having a lot of style that can’t quite mask some wonky underpinnings.
Conclusion
Neon Blood was still an enjoyable ride despite the issues listed, mainly again due to that stellar presentation and a tale that, while not exactly original, was executed well (and briefly) enough to keep our interest high throughout.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
