Blood Waves

Let me ask you a question: Are you looking for a third-person arena shooter where all you do is run around a tiny room shooting at zombies? Are you okay if that room never changes and the bad guys are always the same? If you answered yes to these two questions, then Blood Waves is definitely the game for you. However, if you're anything like me and want more than a barebones arena shooter, then you're better off just throwing at dart at the thousands of other zombie games on the market.

I'm not going to lie, when I heard the name Blood Waves, I immediately pictured an ultra-violent surfing game. Sadly, this is just another boring third-person shooter where the player is locked in a tiny room and forced to fight against hordes of flesh-loving zombies. In this case, take the role of a Lara Croft clone who is given no story or personality. Her entire existence is to run around and shoot underpowered guns at wave after wave of boring enemies.

Even if you've never played a wave-based arena shooter before, you still know the formula. You kill a set number of zombies, pick up the money they leave behind and use it to buy new weapons, ammo and defenses. Then it's back to the round room to shoot more zombies, followed by more spending, more shooting, more spending, more shooting and so on so forth until you either die or get bored and quit.

This monotonous structure could have been helped by a nice variety of creative weapons, but don't get your hopes up. Blood Waves starts you out with a machete and pistol, neither of which are very effective after wave two or three. The idea is to save up and buy a shotgun, assault rifle, rocket launcher and even a mini-gun. It's all stuff you've seen before, and this game doesn't even attempt to give them a slightly different spin.

I would be okay with the boring weapon selection if they were at least fun to shoot, but the third-person action is a chore. This cardboard Lara Croft is slow and her aim is fidgety. The gameplay is imprecise with the console gamepads and the weapons feel underpowered. Even when you spend your skill points to upgrade the different guns, it never seems to make a big impact on the action. The zombies are bullet sponges and blowing them up is neither satisfying nor especially bloody.

On top of upgrading the weapons, you're also able to buy to perks for your hero. This involves giving her more life, more stamina, better resistance to acid, faster health recharge, more effective rolls, an extra shield and a whole bunch more. Much like everything else in this game, none of this is especially original, but it does force you to choose how you want to spec your character.

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It's also worth mentioning that you can purchase walls, traps and turrets that will draw the attention of the zombies and give you some added fire. This is a big help, but you have to keep track of them or else they will be quickly destroyed. Sort of like the guns in the game, I came away wishing that the defensive barricades were a little more effective.

Although Blood Waves is a little too limited in scope for my tastes, I can see the appeal of this type of arena shooter. There's something cathartic about shooting wave after wave of enemy without worrying about walking through linear levels. My contention is that this game doesn't do this style of wave-based combat particularly well. The levels are a real slog to get through, since they always play out the exact same way. Everything takes too long to get going, and when it finally starts to get interesting, you're likely to die because an explosive zombie sneaks up behind you or because you get backed up against the wall in the cheapest way possible. And maybe it's just me, but I never wanted to try again when I died. In fact, I had to force myself to stay interested, and that felt like a full-time job.

I think part of the problem is that we're stuck in a single location. And it's not that this specific arena looks bad, but rather that it wasn't interesting enough to stand out. Cycling through a handful of different arenas would have made a huge difference, as would randomizing other aspects of the game. But instead what we get is a predictable third-person shooter where the arena, enemies and weapons are always the same. The real enemy in this game isn't the brain-eating zombies, but rather it's the crushing boredom.