Bleed 2 Review

There’s an arcade-shaped hole in my history. It’s a product of circumstance, as it so often is with us young’uns; wrong place, wrong time. If you wanted video games, you were in the house, because that’s where they inevitably were to be found. The concept of going out and pouring pocket money into them was patently absurd, though that might have been because the only arcade in the vicinity was the Timezone on the boardwalk: a dingy purgatory of flashing LEDs and claw machines that felt about as welcoming to meek schoolchildren as the maw of the Leviathan. What could an arcade really offer in this millennium, anyway? Cheap prizes? Gimmicky peripherals? Thanks, but I’d rather just go two doors down and covet my friend’s PlayStation.

So, when arcade games migrated their way onto my horrible beige-tastic PC, by way of one of those ‘Look How Many Hobbyist Games We Crammed Onto This Shrink-Wrapped CD’ packages, I had questions. Why is this so needlessly hard? What’s a “continue”? How do I shoot fireballs out of my hands? What’s with the obsession with high scores? Why can’t I save in the middle? C’mon, Matt, this is stupid. Let’s go back to Need for Speed.

Bleed 2 is not one of those games. Bleed 2 is an arcade game for the modern age, and the first lesson it demonstrates from arcade games is this: not everything needs exposition. You are Wryn, a girl with purple hair. You have guns. You have a sword. There’s a big spaceship outside your apartment raining down hellfire, and you’re clearly the person best equipped to deal with it, so off you go. The controls are strictly twin-sticks and triggers, one of the clearest signs that a game is going to have the pace of a berserk cat on a polished tiled floor, and sure enough, as soon as you set off it becomes clear that you wouldn’t want to touch the face buttons even if they did have some functionality. Normally moving a character in a run n’ gun side-scroller with an analogue stick feels like trying to stir a bowl of pasta with a fistful of more pasta, but in Bleed 2 it doesn’t just feel natural—it’s critical. You have a steerable air-dodge that can be activated up to three times per jump, and being able to carve graceful arcs through the air as you steer around oncoming attacks is so immensely freeing that it’s well worth the small period of adjustment.

It’s this kind of finely-tuned movement that demonstrates the second lesson to be learned from arcade games: feel is critical, and feel is in the fine details. Bleed 2 is a game that feels like it’s been quietly, gently polished for years, like a classic roadster in an English countryside shed. Every inch of the visual design has been made immediately readable, yet every animation has a punch to it. Wryn’s responsiveness and momentum are delicately balanced, ensuring that no matter how fast you go, you’re never out of control. Every level flows seamlessly from encounter to boss to encounter, never wasting your time but still leaving moments here and there to breathe. It feels so fundamentally right, and that’s a luxury you don’t get often.

Speaking of things that feel fundamentally right: let’s talk parrying. Metal Gear Rising, a realistic depiction of near-future warfare and the physical effects of transhumanism, demonstrated that almost any incoming attack can be parried if you’re feeling audacious enough, and to my immense joy, Bleed 2 carries on a small fragment of that audaciousness. Purple-tinged attacks (or yellow-tinged, if you’re the second player) can be reflected with a deft, well-timed flick of the thumbstick, from melee strikes to mortar fire, and there’s no scientific instrument on Earth currently capable of measuring the burst of satisfaction you get when you slap an enemy’s missile spinning right back into their stupid, unprepared face. While you can theoretically dodge almost any attack, parrying can be a much safer and rewarding option—even with the rather short animation, which ensures a tight window for success—and in special cases even grants you other boons, like temporarily disabling part of a boss’s assault.

Which brings us to the only part of the central mechanics I feel a little bit iffy about: slow-motion. Remarkably, the game doesn’t punish you for using it—alright, it consumes energy, but it regenerates ludicrously fast—but at the same time, some attacks move so quickly, especially on higher difficulty modes, that not using slow-motion to deal with them feels like a laughable fantasy. Is that a problem? I suppose it’s a matter of philosophy, or ego, perhaps. There’s not strictly anything wrong with giving the player an ability and leaving it up to them to figure out when it’s necessary, but part of the whole appeal of Bleed 2 is in its swift pace and consistent flow. Having to slam on the brakes as a matter of course, rather than as an occasional crutch or fall-back, feels like a betrayal of that central tenet; an admission that actually the speed is just for show, and the encounter was designed to be played this way.

Maybe I just need to load up on energy drinks first, or something.

Another nice thing about Bleed 2 is that it’s not afraid to stay lean, bringing us to another lesson worth keeping from arcade games: keep things short, dense, and intense. Unless you hit a serious roadblock at some point—don’t worry, you won’t; the normal mode is clearly supposed to get you through with minimal fuss—an average playthrough clocks in neatly at just under an hour, giving it a nice bite-sized arc that finishes before your eyes start to ache. As per usual with this kind of thing, you’re encouraged to shoot for high scores and try harder difficulty modes so you can brag relentlessly to all the kids in the pizza parlour, but in the event that you get chased out—amid complaints that you ‘smell like wet carpets’ and ‘never order anything’—the game has unlockable weapons, dash types and characters that’ll put different spins on future attempts. If I’m honest, though, I’m not especially enamoured with any of them. It might just be because switching to a different set of abilities after developing the muscle memory for the default loadout feels about as comfortable as learning to dance with your feet trapped in gravy boats, but none of them feel quite as flexible or as fun to use as your basic gun/sword/dodge combo. Yes, yes, a rocket launcher might sound tempting when all your enemies are clustered tighter than flies around a forgotten wheelie bin, but I could pick out two or three targets out of the air with my infinite stream of bullets before the rocket’s even arrived, so frankly why bother?

Furthermore, as well-designed as the combat encounters are, the enemy variety in Bleed 2 is a bit… well, not underwhelming, but certainly lacking in surprises. Sure, being able to recognise a familiar design and go “ah, yes, they’re going to launch a mortar in an arc towards me in approximately one point five seconds, now I can plan ahead” is theoretically a better experience than being knocked out by an unexpected boxing glove to the nads, but I sort of miss the bizarre ‘anything goes’ attitude of excess in old arcade side-scrollers that would throw in one-off enemies willy-nilly. Bleed 2 feels clean and efficient, recycling generic goons where it makes perfect sense to recycle generic goons. But you know what’s better than making sense? An inexplicably-placed luchador who tries to flying-tackle you out of nowhere, falls off the stage, and is never seen again.

And now that we’re most assuredly on the train to Nitpick Town, let’s get a few other little things out of the way before wrapping up. There’s one section of the game that’s an auto-scroller for no particularly well-explained reason—there isn’t, say, an encroaching wall with a load of angry cats velcroed to it on the left side of the screen—and while it’s certainly not an egregious or lingering section, it consistently earned a raised eyebrow. The local multiplayer is a fine addition, very much in the spirit of sitting on the floor in front of the telly and getting cracker crumbs in the carpet while you take on Ultra Hard mode together, but forcing both players to share the health bar and the energy bar (!) seems like a one-way trip to somebody getting up and walking away in disgust. Stop wasting the slow-mo, you prat, I need it to parry those missiles.

Also, there’s no blood in Bleed 2. I’m willing to believe that’s someone’s idea of irony.

When Bleed first came out on Xbox Live—way back in the halcyon days of 2012—indie games were in a pretty different spot. Nowadays they’re bigger than ever, and the struggle to get noticed in the face of globalised storefronts with subpar curation is getting tougher by the day. At a glance, Bleed 2 doesn’t do much to stand out; it doesn’t have a wild one-of-a-kind gimmick, it’s not breaking new ground, and it’s certainly not been cynically engineered to appear on every shouty video game YouTube channel on the planet. What it offers, though, is equally hard to find: an immaculately-polished experience that offers all the action of a classic run n’ gun side-scroller without wallowing in archaic design. It’s not an arcade game. And frankly, it’s better that way.