Bloodboarderz Review
Beaten On: 1.5.23
Hours Played: .5
Rating: 8.5/10
Available for free or donation on itch.io, BloodBoarderz puts you in the boots of a serial killing snowboarder, slicing and slashing their way down a mountain. It’s just a demo, but the 30 minutes or so that I played was a blast.
This is going to be another short one, because this is again, just a single level demo style game.
BloodBoarderz is styled like a PS1 game, which already puts it off on the right foot, and being inspired by games like SSX should be enough to pique almost any 90’s kid’s interest; it did mine. Beyond that, the game is also influenced by classic slasher films.
You start out by picking a character and snowboard, much like you would in an SSX game, and from there you’re dropped at the top of a ski slope. After that, the game’s pretty straightforward; you’ve got a timer and health, when you run out of health you respawn at the most recent checkpoint, and when you run out of time, it’s game over.
In order to gain more time, which you definitely need to finish the course, you have to kill other patrons of the ski slope by slashing to your left or right. I didn’t think this would be such a big part of the game, as far as the gameplay goes; I figured it’d be a little gimmicky, but it adds a surprising amount of depth.
As you’re going down the slope, other riders spawn at set points, which is where a lot of the improvement between runs can come from, by memorizing these spawns. The real complexity, though, is in the way of balancing the time it takes to slow down and kill someone, vs just flying past them, since they all move a lot slower than you. This gameplay loop resulted in me grinding out a checkpoint to stock up some time before finishing the run. It might sound annoying, but it was actually fun coming up with a strategy. This was enhanced by my self-imposed goal of collecting all the presents in the level, otherwise I’d probably have beaten it on my 2nd or 3rd run.
The game feels distinctly 90’s, and it was a blast to play through. If the developer ever created a full version I’d buy it in a heartbeat, and it would make a fantastic physical release. If you’re a fan of SSX and SSX Tricky, give this a play, it was a half hour well spent.
- Zack
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