Captain Blood Review: Survived the Odds but for What?

It’s Been 84 Years

Not every day in the gaming industry, a game deemed vaporware gets an official release 22 years after its announcement. Captain Blood, the sea-faring, cutlass-brandishing hack and slash game, is lucky in this regard. First unveiled in 2003, it struggled in development hell through multiple reboots before being officially canceled in 2010. Yet against all expectations, the game resurfaced when its source code leaked online in 2022. And while it was never truly ‘lost,’ I still doubted we’d ever see an official release on modern platforms. Yet here we are.

Thanks to the publisher SNEG and developer General Arcade, Captain Blood would see an official release for PC and consoles on May 6, 2025. Now, regardless of the quality of Captain Blood, I must applaud both the publisher and the developer for their conviction to stick by a long-forgotten game. A win for game preservation. As for the game, it’s pretty rough…

Old Grog, Old Bottle

What you get is a straightforward hack-and-slash experience – linear levels, minimal exploration, fixed camera angles, and combat as the sole focus. While the fighting can feel satisfying when everything clicks, it’s often undermined by janky mechanics: phantom hits, hitscanning ranged units, unreliable hitboxes, and a host of other glitches. It’s the very definition of ‘when it works, it works’ – the problem is how rarely that actually happens.

True to genre conventions, you’ll battle through cramped corridors against endless enemy hordes. To its credit, the core combat feels surprisingly responsive – landing hits has satisfying weight, and the brutal finisher animations never get old. The game occasionally breaks up the monotony with boarding sequences where you repel Spanish sailors and fend off attacking ships using a mix of swordplay and mounted cannons. Sadly, these segments overstay their welcome, dragging on far longer than they should. Worst of all? This pirate adventure somehow manages to completely miss the boat on actual naval combat – an unforgivable omission for a game set on the high seas.

Welcome back, Spider-Man 3

From what I understand, the story of Captain Blood is unchanged from its inception. Supposedly based on the 1922 novel of the same name, the game sees the fearsome pirate captain Peter Blood taking the fight to the Spanish forces in the lawless waters of 17th 17th-century Spanish Main. Unlike the novel, the story of the game is pretty forgettable and exactly what you’d expect from a low-budget hack-and-slash game from the mid-2000s. There are a couple of cool cutscenes and setpieces, but other than that, the story and the ritual character are unremarkable. But some parts of me agree that it’s part of the charm.

Since the story was so forgettable, I often found myself glancing at my phone the first time generic cutscenes popped up. This was a mistake. Much like Spider-Man 3 (a beloved internet meme thanks to its unintentionally funny QTEs), Captain Blood forces you to keep your eyes glued to the screen—or suffer instant failure in its relentless, instakill QTE-filled cutscenes. Look, I get it. Captain Blood is a product of its time. However, the cleanup crew over at General Arcade could have at least included an option to skip all these pointless QTE sections.

A Bucket of Mishaps

But the real kicker? The checkpoint system is so unforgiving that a single missed QTE means replaying whole sections from scratch—because nothing says ‘fun’ like pointless repetition. At one point, the penultimate boss glitched out, forcing me to quit to the menu and reload the last checkpoint (the game doesn’t even have a ‘restart checkpoint’ option in the pause menu). And as if that weren’t bad enough, when I reloaded, the game decided my punishment was replaying the “entire level” from scratch. FUN!

Then there’s the sound mixing – it’s completely busted. The game assaults your ears with deafening background tracks while dialogue whispers at barely audible levels. After one session, I ripped off my headphones, convinced actual hornets were nesting in them. The resolution settings appear fundamentally broken – adjusting them only changes the internal rendering while leaving the output display squished. Even at 1440p, the image looks unnaturally compressed, with stretched character models that look disproportionately tall.

Then there are the gameplay bugs. The most inexcusable bug I’ve run into is the upgrade system not functioning the way it’s intended to. People familiar with hack and slash know that upgrading the characters’ abilities and unlocking new moves play in the power fantasy that the genre provides. Except that in Captain Blood, half the moves in the upgrade window don’t work or don’t work as intended. There’s no way to find what works and what does not without trial and error.

This is a repeating theme throughout Captain Blood. The game is outright broken and is pretty much the same as the leaked 1.0 build. According to the publisher, they never intended to fix or change the game in any way whatsoever. In the words of SNEG co-founder Oleg Klapovskiy,  “Our goal was to bring it as close to the original as possible. We are not game designers; it’s not our game, we were not working on it from the very beginning. There was a team of creative minds that had the vision for it.” While I respect their commitment to preservation, charging $24.99 for this release means SNEG bears responsibility for delivering a functional product. Looking at you, too, Margarite Entertainment!

Real Talk

The publisher argues that while Captain Blood might rate as a 4/10 today, it would’ve scored a 7.5/10 back in the mid-2000s. But let’s be honest—even if this game had launched on its original schedule, it would’ve still been panned. Broken mechanics don’t magically become acceptable just because they’re old. As someone who values game preservation, I respect the effort to revive lost projects, but that doesn’t excuse selling a fundamentally unfinished product—especially one that may never be properly fixed. Dodge Captain Blood like your character dodges non-existent i-frames.

FINAL SCORE: 40/100