By:
Monolith
Every Christmas prompts a game reviewer to reminisce, casting a canny eye over the year's big guns (e.g. Half-Life) and stale buns (e.g. Trespasser). The 'stale buns' are normally so full of promise and only deliver via the safe option of an already successful genre- the first person shooter. Skepticism aside, 99.9% of gamers enjoy fragging the hell out of anything that moves correct? Correct. Granted, Blood II is the sequel to last year's Blood- but we won't feel guilty if you don't.
Blood's misgivings lay within its regurgitation of an outdated Build engine, which at the time was the 'backbone' of many other lackluster first person shooters. In fact, it's still criminally being used by Xatrix Entertainment for Redneck Rampage sequels (wake up and smell the roses!). 1998 has seen the Quake II engine become the 'backbone' of most 3D first person shooters. But developer's, Monolith, has begged to differ with Blood II by not licensing id's technology. Blood II's Project Leader James 'Shade' Wilson told Sharky Extreme a while ago that,
"Most importantly we wanted a game that plays like Blood. We were all thrilled with how Blood came out, and we're convinced that if Blood had been released with cutting edge technology it would have been a tremendous success."
Recognizing that one can't fashion a silk purse out of a pig's ass, the Blood 2 project has been undertaken with a newly developed 3D engine. Thus, they've opted for their proprietary LithTech Engine, which was also used for Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. James Wilson, Project Leader of Blood II, explained why the Quake II engine was a non-starter,
"LithTech Engine is ours and the lead engineer is right down the hall. We considered the Q2 engine but it doesn't do everything, and Carmack will be the first to agree with that statement. It [LithTech Engine] also has the features we needed for Blood II, many of which would have required so much development of the Quake engine that we couldn't have done it in Blood II's time scale."
In terms of visual flair, the LithTech engine is up their with id's box of tricks and pertains similar bells and whistles, such as, colored and dynamic lighting, real-time shadows, light mapping, terrain mapping and translucency/transparency for water/glass effects. Scorching, but for those without 3D cards- be prepared to face the bloody prospect of a software version. The LithTech Engine isn't limited to one API though, and one of its main strengths stems from its modular nature, allowing Monolith to take out an entire render and plug in a new one. Thus a native Glide (3Dfx) version for Voodoo2, Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo banshee owners has been coupled with a D3D version that ekes out the best from any D3D compliant 3D card, such as the nVidia TNT. It's not as fast as the Glide version but it's somewhat prettier and those of you with a fully loaded PC (a Voodoo2 SLI and TNT combo) can pick and choose between what suits you best. If you want our opinion (and if you don't we'll give it to you anyway) then use the TNT for single player at 1280x1024- the visuals are superb. For multiplayer, the best thing to do is to trade off some of the looks and then opt for sheer speed with the Voodoo2's.
