Nintendo Switch – Bleed #60

Unforgiving Jumps!

Nowadays it is easy to find quality platformers, but it is hard to find challenging ones. In a world filled with exploration platformers like Poi and Mario Odyssey, I can’t help but wish that there was some sort of challenge that just made me want to throw my joy-cons at the TV. They say stress is bad, but I love it, so when I learned that Bleed was an indie platformer that brings back challenge into the mix, I was incredibly excited to check it out.

Is Bleed satisfyingly hard or is it hard to recommend? Let’s find out!

Bleed – Nintendo Switch – Released: 12/14/17 – $14.99

Short Review

Bleed was hard, even at the easy difficulty it had me helplessly begging for help and that was its strongest perk. However with only 7 forgettable and relatively repetitive bosses on top of a steep price tag, I was happy I didn’t have to pay for this one.

Here is the icon for Bleed:

Story

You’re a girl wanting to be the next big “hero” and to do that you must go on a journey to kill every single living hero. The game’s title applies perfectly here as through your journey your only goal is to drain blood from your enemies in order to rise in power, in other words: make them bleed!

Gameplay

Another area where the title applies is the gameplay, and it’s not in a good way. Just like your enemies, expect to Bleed a lot. The game has a boast feature that let’s you teleport in any direction up to three times in a row, along with a cool control of time that allows you to slow it down, increasing your chance to escape attacks. However even with all these powerups, you will still bleed a lot because the game is just simply unforgiving. Enemies are repetitive with their attacks, but their attacks are so powerful that failing to predict a move once or twice will have you down and ready to restart. To make this even worse, the checkpoints seem to be far too distant from one another, causing you to have to replay entire sections due to one dumb mistake. In the end, Bleed will have you memorizing levels, which is just simply unrewarding in my personal opinion.

Content

To me this is Bleed’s biggest problem. The game has 7 bosses and once you’ve memorized how to beat them, it doesn’t take very long to finish a level. I’d say the entire process takes around twenty minutes maximum per level. While that would be okay, it isn’t due to the high price of this game, $14.99 is just simply too much for a couple of hours of fun, specially when you’re dying more than anything. The game’s visuals are also somewhat lacking, but what isn’t lacking is the stellar soundtrack, but that again gets outdone by both the game’s high price and frustration.

Conclusion

In the end, Bleed is frustrating in ways that completely deviate from what I wanted in a challenging platformer. While there is fun to be had, it is a bitter purchase at $14.99. Had this title come out at $5 or $10, I’d say it’s worth a look, but until then you are better off staying away from it.

UPDATE: 5/30/18

I would give this game a 6 out of 10!

Trailer:

End Credits

The whole experience has been amazing on the website so far! As it was previously mentioned, I am going on a trip for a few days but I don’t see it disturbing my reviews at all. I am also looking to buy the Xbox one S so if everything goes well expect reviews for it soon!

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