Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood – Review

What’s up, gamers, Genvel here, and this is our brutally honest review for Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood. I am extremely disappointed. This is a game with some good trailers, some good teasers, and it looked like it could have been a project with a lot of potential in it. But let me say right up front, Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood is the worst game I’ve played this year.

It manages to squander some excellent lore, the acting is terrible, and the gameplay is extremely basic. Now I want to try and break this game down, see the bad parts, and highlight the small parts that are very good.

Combat

Let’s begin by talking with the combat. So Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood originally started as a tabletop RPG. A pen and paper game where you’d actually explore sneak around and try and take down some evil corporations which typically were like oil rigs deforestation, I mean, you guys are kind of like hippie werewolves. You live in the woods with your friends, and you try and stop all sorts of these big evil conglomerates. This unfolds in the game itself by being a mix of stealth and flat out classic combat.

So when you go into typically every single area is a confined room, there will be like six guards in a row, and you have to try and find a way to sneak around like a tiny little wolf and tactically take them down one by one without being spotted by the guards or the cameras. And you do this about 500 times in a row. This is pretty much the entire game, but if for some reason you do get spawned, if somebody does manage to call outs, ‘oh my god, there’s a 90-pound wolf right there,’ well then, in that case, combat breaks loose. Now here’s where the game; I feel like it tries to be a bit more complex because this is the one part that did feel-good, the gory just visceralness of ripping people to shreds.

Gameplay

Werewolves in this universe are powerful like you are the size of a freaking tank, and you could do things like uppercut people make strong attacks fast attacks. Still, there are some fighting stances you can do what’s called the agile stance, which makes you very quickly, or you can do the more standard combat stance where you stand up on your hind legs and make way stronger attacks, but you can’t run.

Although it may look appealing because you end up just repeating this same sequence repeatedly and again throughout the entire game, this is so bad. There is absolutely no variety; there’s no added depth you don’t ever get like werewolf magic, like straight up the way you win the very first fight in the game you can use in every single fight.

But the big problem with this is that I wish that stealth were a bigger element to this. Essentially the way this works is that every single encounter is the same type. They’re telling you to sneak into a room and try and hack a panel and stuff. You can still use your crossbow to stun people, but the best course of action is to choke a couple of people and then immediately wolf out and kill everybody. It’s just so easy; like most people, you’re just fighting against average guys like random dudes with body armor for the entire majority of this game. You eat them incredibly easily, obviously right.

But as the game goes on, you start to learn about earth blood. You get a chance to start to experience what’s going on at this company, which is basically like amazon decided to make super soldiers. It’s people that start being incredibly buff, they’re resistant to your claw attacks, and later on towards the last half of the game in the last final sections, you start to see these people that have these super abilities, people that are kind of like evil werewolves I guess I say because they start to have their own strengths and weaknesses and special abilities that kind of rival your own.

My problem with this is that towards the very very last chapters, there are a couple of monsters that are introduced in the final chapters of this game that are very cool to me and actually change things up at the very end they start to try and give you an actual challenge and make things feel more complex and rewarding. If they’ve taken every kind of monster and just sprinkled them throughout the entire game, it would have been better for it.

The fact that I can so easily do the same series of attacks, the series of grabs and take down people from the very beginning to the very end, is a huge letdown. The biggest problem with this game it never gets hard, like never once does this game start to toy with the idea of actual difficulty. It feels like they’re trying to be afraid of making it where your werewolf will feel weak, and so because of it, every single scenario is sneak in, rage out, rips everybody to pieces, go to the next room. But here’s the extra problem I have: throughout this game, there is no variety.

I want to talk about something in this game that I did find interesting because it is obviously because you are supposed to be sneaking around. There isn’t a lot of like experience points based on combat; instead, you get all your experience points by story progression by hitting the next checkpoints, by surpassing the next mech area but one of the extra ways you can get a bunch of extra XP is by finding spirits of energy. So while you’re going around, you’re sneaking, you can find little tiny shrines that are like nature relics, and by praying to them, they bless you with spirit energy, which is basically used in the talent trees.

Now part of the reason I like this is that the talent trees do give you some extra skills they allow you to do, like a slam attack that creates a shock wave, or you can get a special rage mode that lets you actually do like a series of attacks but part of the reason I really enjoyed this is that it truly evokes the lore. Like the biggest problem with this game, Werewolf: The Apocalypse is an amazing tabletop RPG.

They have like 40 years of lore that they could have gone into. They could have actually taken the story into so many interesting directions even though it is sneak into a base and shred a couple of employees up. This drives me nuts because the original cutscene, the opening cutscene of this game is amazing. It shows the fact that there are these three separate factions of our world. There are the wild, the weaver, and the worm, and this is basically the style of life, the style of order, and the existence of destruction fire. The fact that fire needs to burn down a forest for new trees to grow.

I like the idea that this constant cycle of life and death and werewolves definitely fit into the system. They try and worship the act of creation and order to fight against the increasing essence of destruction. This gorgeous opening cut scene definitely implies that we would be doing something to fit into this. We’d be doing our own part to play a role in the cycle of life and death, but we don’t. Like this is just a cheap little tiny useless game at times where you’re gonna be hacking and slashing.

It feels like a PlayStation 2 game because it has such a repetitive essence at its heart. It manages to just constantly do the same things again and again and hope that you’ll stay entertained.

Bad NPCs

Now let’s talk about the most laughably bad part: there is a surprising amount of dialogue in this. Whenever you go back to base, and for some reason, the base is just right next to the enemies like you can straight up the walk from one zone to the other while you’re hanging out with your werewolf buddies or the humans that are friends with you, there’s a lot of dialogue options.

There are actually trees that allow you to go through and talk to different methodologies, seeking information, asking questions, or sometimes just figuring out about your next mission. The dialogue is horrendously bad.

As you can see, the character models themselves are atrocious, but when you’re playing this game, every single line of dialogue, everything that people speak is weird. Everybody talks like such a robot, which is ironic because we’re supposed to be the creatures of nature, yet we do not speak naturally. Everybody you encounter is like a sock puppet.

It’s so disappointing that they decided to base this on Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood specifically. This is a game with so much rich history, so much incredibly well-developed lore and they decided to turn it into this. If you’re wondering if this is a game that’s worth the price, it absolutely is not. But if you’re looking for a game to try and sail when you see this for five dollars in a month or two, maybe it’s worth that.

Verdict

It was kind of interesting to go and be a werewolf. It was kind of nice to shred people, but this is definitely one of those games that have a very, very strong opening 90 minutes and then a long, very boring game after that, and I hate to say boring because that’s the greatest insult, but yeah for most this game I was downright bored.