Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood (PC) Review
System PC
Developer Sakari Indie Publisher Sakari Indie Genre Third Person Shooter # of Players 1 Release Date August 4th, 2009 |
Pros
Gameplay is fun in short doses. Cons Short Campaign Little to no replayability |
Review
by Thonos
11/19/2015
Indie games have become a very powerful force for PC gaming. With game making tools becoming easier for beginners to use and more ways for these games to get out to the masses, all you need need now is the time and dedication to make a game. Over the past few years we have seen many great games from the indie game community that might not have ever been done 10 years ago. Then you get games like Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood, a simple game with simple game play. This on its own is not a bad thing, but might be a turn off depending what you are looking for.
Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood has no story. You play as a single solider who fights off waves of enemies while defending yourself and your objectives. Each mission is either won by defeating all the waves or lasting ten minutes. The game has a six mission campaign plus one bonus mission which takes around an hour to complete. Before each mission you pick from three dificulties (the fourth difficulty unlocks after you beat the campaign). The higher difficulties are more challenging, provide more experience and reward you more money for completeing the mission. While it is nice to have difficulty options, unless you are trying to level your character I didn't see much of a point to them.
You earn experience while doing missions whether you win or loose. As you rank up you unlock items, colors and weapons for your character. The accessories and different color outfits for your character are just for cosmetic purposes, with the exception of the night goggles which I found little use for. If you fully unlock everything in the game you have access to 11 weapons which can be purchased ranging from shotguns, machine guns, sniper rifles and even a air strike. I really didn't find a lot of variety with the weapons and often used the same setup for every mission and I had no problem.
I enjoyed the gameplay here, but it is simple, easy and repetitive. Enemies come at you, kill enemies, more enemies spawn, kill enemies, ect. Part of the problem is that when doing a mission there is a tent you can go to about every minute and you get ammo for your weapons and a repair kit for your objective dropped into the map. This just kills most of the challenge since you never will run out of ammo for your secondary and special weapons (your primary can be a handgun which has unlimited ammo). And if you pay attention to your objectives health you can always keep that close to full. Throw in that your character automatically regenerates there health you end up with a pretty easy game. Higher difficulties do help here, but again you do not gain much by making the game harder for yourself.
The game uses simple 3d models for the games characters environments and characters. The graphics thrown on top of the models look cartoony which is what the developer was going for. The level designs and environments are also simple and bland, but I feel that was part of the game design. The audio in the game from the sound effects and music is passable, but not remarkable or remember able. I did have some graphic issues with the game which caused the text on screen and in the menus to be unreadable but this was only when I used a high resolution. Using the standard resolution the game starts with caused no problems.
Re playability is a big issue with this game. Beating the game unlocks extreme difficulty and endless mode. Endless mode is good if you want to level up your character but if you have unlocked this mode you have already beaten the game so there is no real reason to keep leveling. Extreme diffiuclty will give you a decent challenge but I did not find it incredibly challenging. You can always try to get a higher score to see how high you can get on the global leaderboards. But at this point if you are doing that you are just trying to kill time.
I do not regret getting Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood. I enjoyed the simple gameplay and cartoon style graphics. However the games short campaign and limited re playability do hurt this game. If you are looking at this game I would wait for a sale.
by Thonos
11/19/2015
Indie games have become a very powerful force for PC gaming. With game making tools becoming easier for beginners to use and more ways for these games to get out to the masses, all you need need now is the time and dedication to make a game. Over the past few years we have seen many great games from the indie game community that might not have ever been done 10 years ago. Then you get games like Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood, a simple game with simple game play. This on its own is not a bad thing, but might be a turn off depending what you are looking for.
Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood has no story. You play as a single solider who fights off waves of enemies while defending yourself and your objectives. Each mission is either won by defeating all the waves or lasting ten minutes. The game has a six mission campaign plus one bonus mission which takes around an hour to complete. Before each mission you pick from three dificulties (the fourth difficulty unlocks after you beat the campaign). The higher difficulties are more challenging, provide more experience and reward you more money for completeing the mission. While it is nice to have difficulty options, unless you are trying to level your character I didn't see much of a point to them.
You earn experience while doing missions whether you win or loose. As you rank up you unlock items, colors and weapons for your character. The accessories and different color outfits for your character are just for cosmetic purposes, with the exception of the night goggles which I found little use for. If you fully unlock everything in the game you have access to 11 weapons which can be purchased ranging from shotguns, machine guns, sniper rifles and even a air strike. I really didn't find a lot of variety with the weapons and often used the same setup for every mission and I had no problem.
I enjoyed the gameplay here, but it is simple, easy and repetitive. Enemies come at you, kill enemies, more enemies spawn, kill enemies, ect. Part of the problem is that when doing a mission there is a tent you can go to about every minute and you get ammo for your weapons and a repair kit for your objective dropped into the map. This just kills most of the challenge since you never will run out of ammo for your secondary and special weapons (your primary can be a handgun which has unlimited ammo). And if you pay attention to your objectives health you can always keep that close to full. Throw in that your character automatically regenerates there health you end up with a pretty easy game. Higher difficulties do help here, but again you do not gain much by making the game harder for yourself.
The game uses simple 3d models for the games characters environments and characters. The graphics thrown on top of the models look cartoony which is what the developer was going for. The level designs and environments are also simple and bland, but I feel that was part of the game design. The audio in the game from the sound effects and music is passable, but not remarkable or remember able. I did have some graphic issues with the game which caused the text on screen and in the menus to be unreadable but this was only when I used a high resolution. Using the standard resolution the game starts with caused no problems.
Re playability is a big issue with this game. Beating the game unlocks extreme difficulty and endless mode. Endless mode is good if you want to level up your character but if you have unlocked this mode you have already beaten the game so there is no real reason to keep leveling. Extreme diffiuclty will give you a decent challenge but I did not find it incredibly challenging. You can always try to get a higher score to see how high you can get on the global leaderboards. But at this point if you are doing that you are just trying to kill time.
I do not regret getting Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood. I enjoyed the simple gameplay and cartoon style graphics. However the games short campaign and limited re playability do hurt this game. If you are looking at this game I would wait for a sale.