Reviews
[Review] ‘Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood’ is a Rough and Ready Action Game with Satisfying Werewolf Combat
Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is very much like one of those horror films where it’s a bit shoddy, you know the budget isn’t especially high, but it has blood flying about, and an enthusiastic charm that shines through.
The latest in a variety of games that draw from the monster-filled World of Darkness universe is, on the surface, a relatively standard third-person action game where you take control of a grizzled white guy scrapping against an evil force, and for portions of the game that is extremely true. It’s at least not a traditional action game plot. Cahal, an eco-terrorist banished from his group long ago, is dragged back into a battle against sinister corporation Pentex. Oh, and he’s a Garou; part of a werewolf tribe that is being forced out of their home by the actions of Pentex. Across the game’s story, he will sabotage and destroy Pentex’s facilities to drive it back out of the Garou’s homeland, and save the environment from disaster.
Cahal’s transformation abilities see him able to become a regular wolf or a hulking werewolf, and each of his three forms comes with its own flavor of gameplay. In human form, Cahal converses with others, is able to get into regular human-occupied spaces without alarms being raised, and perform stealth takedowns. As a regular wolf, the action shifts into stealth, with Cahal able to slink about just out of eyeshot of guards. When spotted, the action really starts, and he can unleash his rage-fueled werewolf form to snap and tear enemies to shreds, reverting back to human form when a room is cleared of threats.
This cycle of human-to-wolf-to-werewolf does become somewhat predictable as there’s a clear definition of what you can or cannot be in any given area, but slipping between these forms remains satisfying nonetheless. Plodding around the same safe areas as human Cahal over and over would get old quick if not for the instantaneous ability to shift into wolf form and go bounding around the place. Unleashing the werewolf form sees Cahal burst into a mass of fur and fury that often feels cathartic after sneaking past enemy after enemy only to get spotted by a camera you missed. In this form, the game is essentially a hack and slash action game, with Cahal able to gain new Pentax employee-slaying abilities as he progresses and finds collectibles.
It makes the stealth feel a little pointless at times, but that does serve a tactical purpose beyond simply avoiding a fight (you rarely actually end up avoiding a fight for long, hence the occasional feeling of pointlessness). Whilst sneaking, Cahal can switch off cameras, open doors, and sabotage the deployment gates for reinforcements to cause soldiers damage before they ever get to join the fight.
Combat is easily where the game is most enjoyable to actually play. The vicious whirling dervish that is Cahal’s werewolf form isn’t the most refined fighter, but the indiscriminate manner in which he attacks his foes lends itself to the idea this is a creature Cahal himself can barely contain (shown best when it goes into full-blown rage mode). Cahal’s swift return to human form after the last enemy has been destroyed feels like a part of that too. He’d really prefer not to risk losing himself to the spiritual force known as the Wyrm, but when confronted by an inescapable threat, he has no choice.
Fair play to developer Cyanide, it has leaned on the RPG roots of the series to give this story empathy and subtlety beneath its otherwise ordinary surface. Cahal often reconvenes with his former wolf clan between missions. Engaging them in choice-based conversations about their shared past, and the imposing threat Pentax poses to their homeland. Yes, it’s all a bit like a literal Dances With Wolves plot-wise, but the eco-warrior angle in a video game story is honestly a refreshing way to paint the whole ‘chosen one vs. the system’ narrative. Despite the violence against them, the clan generally just want to be left alone, but Pentax increasingly makes that impossible so they fight back simply for their own survival, even if they find it hard to go that far.
The morality of it isn’t really in question as the message is clear. This company is fouling up the environment and taking a homeland by force. There’s every reason for the kind of rage and fury Cahal shows, but even he’s hoping for another solution beyond violence as he doesn’t want to embrace that side of himself.
Where the game actually suffers is in its presentation. While it can look pretty decent in places (mainly in Cahal himself), it’s thoroughly underwhelming on a technical level. Janky, stiff animations, character models that feel a good couple of generations behind the curve, and the uninspired and repetitive level design do little to help endear Earthblood to the player. It does at least keep a steadier framerate than past Cyanide titles, so it’s crucially not overly unpleasant to play. To be honest, when you get down to it and are playing, it’s easy to let the issues slide as Earthblood is entertaining. It’s when things slow down for conversations and story development, an important spoke in Earthblood’s wheel, that those blemishes come to the fore. It probably wouldn’t be such a problem if this was on a regular Xbox One, but it’s not exactly a showcase for the power of the Xbox Series X.
Still, with the strength of the World of Darkness’s rich universe of lore backing it up, Earthblood is far more compelling than it first appears. Just as it looks like a formulaic, repetitive, action game, it throws enough odd stuff and interesting characters into the mix to add a bit of unique pep to proceedings. It would be unfair to call Earthblood ‘mindless fun’ given it has a more positive message to it than a lot of action games, but its easygoing blend of action, stealth, and narrative adventure certainly make it surprisingly simple to get into despite essentially being three games stapled together.
Plus, flipping out and eviscerating hapless goons and mechs as a powerful werewolf doesn’t get old.
Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood review code for Xbox Series X provided by the publisher.
Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is out now on Xbox One, Series X/S, PS4, PS5, and PC.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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