Captain Blood sees players step in the shoes of the titular pirate during the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Captain Blood Review Overview
What is Captain Blood?
Captain Blood is a pirate-themed action-adventure game developed by SeaWolf Studio and General Arcade, and published by SNEG. Originally intended for release in 2010, the game faced numerous delays due to legal complications and the bankruptcy of its previous publisher, Playlogic. After more than a decade in development limbo, it was officially released on May 6, 2025, for the PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
The game is based on Rafael Sabatini’s novels. In 17th-century Caribbean, Captain Blood places players in the role of the titular pirate captain on a mission to rescue a kidnapped magistrate’s daughter.
Captain Blood’s gameplay reflects its early 2000s design origins. It’s similar to God of War in that it combines hack-and-slash combat with quick-time events (QTEs). Players engage in hand-to-hand combat using a variety of weapons such as cutlasses, pistols, and muskets, executing combos and finishers against numerous enemies. Naval combat is also featured, and this allows players to command ship cannons and repel boarding parties.
Captain Blood features:
⚫︎ Retro Xbox 360-Era Graphics
⚫︎ Story Presented Like a Graphic Novel
⚫︎ Gameplay Reminiscent of Early God of War Games
⚫︎ Naval Warfare
 Steam |
 Nintendo |
||||
 PlayStation |
 Xbox |
||||
| Price | $24.99 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Captain Blood Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Surprisingly Fun Environmental Interactions and Weapon Variety Visuals Straight From the Mid-2000s |
Janky and Shallow Like a Mid-2000s Action Game Poor Audio Mixing Mandatory QTEs Punish Heavily Repetitive Combat |
Captain Blood Overall Score - 50/100
Captain Blood is the kind of game that refuses to be buried by time, dragging itself into 2025 like a pirate clinging to a rotting shipwreck. It’s got all the charm of a mid-2000s action game—clunky combat, repetitive loops, and a story that barely floats—but somehow, it’s still oddly endearing in its disastrous nostalgia. The violence is messy, the enemies are dumber than a sack of potatoes, and the camera seems to have its own agenda, but if you’ve ever wished for a lost relic of a simpler, jankier gaming era, there’s something strangely satisfying about it all. It’s flawed, very much so, but for those who find joy in embracing the absurd, you might find a shred of treasure buried beneath all the rust.
Captain Blood Story - 4/10
Captain Blood’s story sails under the banner of grand adventure but quickly runs aground on the shoals of cliché and clumsy execution. What could’ve been a swashbuckling tale ends up feeling like a rough draft buried in an old dev kit—complete with flat characters, limp dialogue, and cutscenes that feel held together with duct tape and hope. There’s the shape of a richer narrative beneath the grime, but it’s buried under half-baked ideas and whisper-quiet audio mixing.
Captain Blood Gameplay - 5/10
Captain Blood’s combat hits with the crunch of early 2000s brawlers, all blood-soaked executions and clunky blocks, but it quickly sinks under the weight of repetition and shallow design choices. Despite some clever environmental tools and a few spirited naval segments, the core loop never evolves, and you are left mashing the same buttons and watching the same finishers ad nauseum. There’s fun to be had in its scrappy design, but it’s the kind that burns bright, fast, and out.
Captain Blood Visuals - 7/10
Captain Blood’s visuals are unapologetically stuck in the past, like a long-lost PS2 game dredged up from the briny deep. Environments are flat and sparsely detailed, character animations are stiff as driftwood, and cutscenes play out like a theater production missing half its props. And yet, there’s a strange, almost endearing charm to its jank—a kind of time-capsule aesthetic that evokes simpler, stranger gaming days. It’s not pretty by modern standards, but it knows what it is and doubles down with B-movie swagger.
Captain Blood Audio - 4/10
The audio design of Captain Blood is just simply bizarre. Dialogue whispers beneath blaring cannon blasts and sound effects trip over one another. Cutscenes are marred by inconsistent mixing, with voices fading into oblivion just as they're meant to deliver crucial exposition. It’s full of odd decisions on top of odd decisions. The soundtrack is admittedly fun upon first listen, but don't expect that enjoyment to last long.
Captain Blood Value for Money - 5/10
At $25, Captain Blood presents itself as a modest proposition in an industry where blockbuster titles often demand triple that. Yet even this low price struggles to justify the experience on offer—a game so entrenched in the design ethos of a bygone era that it feels less like a nostalgic throwback and more like a relic pried from a dusty bargain bin. Its charm, while genuine in fleeting bursts, is buried under repetition, mechanical clunk, and dated design choices. For those with a high tolerance for jank and a soft spot for retro games, there’s value to be had here. But for most, it's a voyage best admired from afar.
Captain Blood Review: Shiver Meh Timbers
Captain Blood has been drifting the high seas of development hell for over two decades before finally washing ashore in 2025. A blood-soaked action game born of the swashbuckling tales of Rafael Sabatini and the brutality of the early 2000s console era, it arrives looking like it’s downloading "secure files" from LimeWire. One gets the sense that this is a game that should’ve been released in 2006, to compete with the likes of the first God of War game.
The version we play today can trace its lineage all the way back to 2004, when the original Captain Blood was announced. It was envisioned as a violent, cinematic action game set during the Golden Age of Piracy—something like God of War by way of Treasure Island. It was even shown at E3 2004! But then, nothing. The game was quietly canceled around 2010 after years of silence, delays, and publisher disinterest.
Fast forward nearly two decades, when French publisher Sneg resurrected the long-forgotten project, now credited to a different developer, General Arcade. Whether they rebuilt it from the old source or simply finished what was left in the attic is unclear. What is clear is that this version of Captain Blood looks, sounds, and plays like a title that missed its launch window by about 15 years and never quite adjusted course. And yet—there’s something weirdly admirable about it. It’s a game with the vibe of a PlayStation 2 release, rough edges and all, that just refuses to die quietly.
DANGER: Shallow Waters Ahead
Captain Blood sees you play as the eponymous antihero—a disgraced nobleman turned privateer—hacking and slashing your way through a heavily fictionalized Caribbean in pursuit of fortune and a return to honor. There’s a vague through-line involving a kidnapped woman, a conspiracy, and a war between the Spanish and English, but mostly, the narrative is a framework to hang your next duel on. Captain Blood sails from island to island to topple villains and mutter gravel-voiced threats, with just enough cutscenes to imply a greater tale being told—though often in the most blunt broad strokes imaginable.
As a story, Captain Blood’s plot is generic as they come. You can see the shape of something grand, yes, but the details have rotted away. The bones of a morally grey journey through colonial injustice and personal redemption are there, but they’re buried under half-baked dialogue, an uneven pacing, and cutscenes that feel stitched together from a forgotten game engine. The writing is flat, the characters are cardboard, and the emotional stakes are spoonfed for you.
What’s worse is that the story is unfortunately hampered by some truly bizarre audio mixing choices. Throughout the cutscenes, character dialogue frequently often sounds whisper-quiet even when the music volume is significantly turned down. To the same degree, sound effects overpower everything else. This issue is compounded by a relentlessly repetitive soundtrack and sound effects that constantly clash, particularly during naval battles, and messing with the settings offer little relief.
A Brawler From a Bygone Era
But Captain Blood is all about action. This is an action game, after all, and it plants itself firmly in the early-to-mid 2000s school of design, with all the ups, downs, and jankiness that implies. You’ll march your grizzled pirate through forts, ships, and islands, carving through scores of enemies in a cascade of combos and gloriously gratuitous slow-motion finishers. It’s the kind of game where every other enemy explodes in a geyser of blood, as Captain Blood spills his personality that’s so dry it could ignite powder kegs.
Combat, to its credit, is punchy and visceral, if not particularly deep. You can’t jump like Kratos, but Captain Blood has a repertoire of basic slashes, parries, and finishing moves, with the option to unlock more combos and executions via a rudimentary skill tree. The animations, I’ll admit, are pretty brutal—blades bite into necks, heads roll, and limbs fly. If you grew up on games like God of War or 2007’s Conan, you’ll feel right at home. But if you’re expecting the precision of modern action titles, best be prepared for a rude awakening. Enemy AI is laughably bad, hit detection can be erratic, and the camera occasionally loses its mind when you’re backed into a corner.
Beyond the blade and the blood, the good Captain is armed with an appropriately rowdy arsenal of tools to spice up combat. In addition to your cutlass, you’re packing a flintlock pistol—ideal for thinning out enemies before they reach you—and a cache of grenades. These tools add some needed dimension to the combat, particularly when fights become overwhelming.
You can also use your environment to your advantage. You can, for instance, pick up an enemy’s dropped musket or swing a heavy axe for a few hits before it breaks. Boxes, barrels, and other conveniently placed detritus can be hurled into enemies’ faces to send with cartoonish force, sending them reeling—or sometimes just awkwardly flopping over. It’s scrappy, yes, but these little flourishes help keep the brawls from collapsing entirely under the weight of their repetition… kind of.
Executions on Loop
The gameplay loop here is pretty straightforward: enter a zone, fight a horde of enemies, sometimes mash a button to kick down a door or pull a lever, and repeat. Most levels follow this pattern to the letter, with the occasional ship combat segment, cannon shootout, and the like. These set pieces are brief and often undercooked, sure, but they do provide momentary sparks of respite from all the button-mashing the game has you do.
It’s messy, it’s clunky, and somehow, it’s still kind of fun. My first few hours with the game were full of my friends and me having fun and marveling at how absurd many of the executions are. However, this didn't last long, and we soon grew tired of these animations, especially since you see them repeatedly.
The combat loop begins to wear thin halfway through the game. Despite a generous move set and flashy finishers, encounters start to blend together. Most enemies fall into one of three archetypes—fodder, big brute, or gunner—and the game rarely demands much more than button-mashing and the occasional dodge roll. The repetition is compounded by level design that leans heavily on arena-style encounters, with exploration, like God of War before it, relegated to you scouring corners to look for chests.
A handful of bosses do their best to inject some variety, but most are just beefier versions of regular enemies with unblockable attacks and slightly more elaborate animations. Sure, new combos and executions can be unlocked over time, but these upgrades rarely revolutionize how you play—they merely prolong the illusion of progression. You’ll still be mashing the same buttons, facing the same grunting foes, and watching the same slow-motion finishing moves play out after a couple of hours in.
Naval Battles are a Chore
Occasionally, the swordplay is traded for cannon fire in the game’s naval combat segments. These sequences, which see you racing across the deck to man different cannons while incoming ships hammer your vessel, is a nice change of pace. There’s a manic, arcade-y thrill to them at first, especially as enemy ships close in and hostile crew members begin boarding your deck. The soundtrack during these segments suggest that they should be thrilling, chaotic, more exciting, and for a while, they are. But like much of the game, they wear thin quickly. There are only so many times you can sprint between cannons and fire broadsides before you start longing for something—anything—different. The tension begins to feel synthetic, the challenge more like a checklist than a genuine test of reflex or skill.
QTEs Should Never Have Been a Thing
And then, there are the quick time events—those dreaded, finger-twitching interludes that rear their head at key cinematic moments. Captain Blood leans hard into these QTEs, and they are unforgiving—fail one input, and the game punts you straight back to the last checkpoint.
QTEs crop up during boss encounters, too, and they are usually composed of the usual suspects: button prompts that flash briefly onscreen, often with little warning, and the button-mash kind. Nail them, and you’re rewarded very little—just a short cutscene that’s not even stylish. Miss even one, and the consequences are disproportionately harsh.
What makes this especially frustrating is the game’s checkpoint system—or, more accurately, its lack of a save system altogether. Players are entirely at the mercy of checkpoints, which is often erratic and sometimes cruelly distant. Die during a QTE, and you’ll be sent back to the nearest checkpoint, which could very well be two arenas and a dozen goons behind you.
This issue is most egregious in boss battles, where some fights conclude with a mandatory QTE. You could endure a gruelling ten-minute fight, dodge attacks, and finally bring your foe to their knees—only to fumble a single prompt and get booted back to the beginning. The sense of triumph dissolves instantly, replaced by pure, unfiltered irritation.
Visuals Dripping with Nostalgia
It’s a good thing that Captain Blood at least looks like it is paying homage to the PS2-era of games. They’re weather-beaten, jagged, and defiantly stuck in a bygone era. And yet, there’s something weirdly comforting about it. Technically, Captain Blood is not an impressive-looking game by modern standards. Environments are static and sparsely detailed. The lighting and shadows are equally flat, and textures look muddy. Characters clip through walls and each other with abandon, and so on and so forth. I could go on and on mentioning every single technical issue I found in the game, but amid the jank and the grime, I can’t help but think that there’s a certain charm to it all, a rough-around-the-edges quality that, in a strange way, pulls me back to my days on the PSP and the Wii.
The environments, while basic, are surprisingly evocative in tone. The game takes you across a variety of classic pirate locales—tropical islands, colonial ports, swaying ships at sea, and more. And though none of them are particularly dense with detail or interaction, they all manage to tap into that Saturday morning sense of adventure. It’s all a bit theatrical, but it sort of works—especially if you’re someone who once cherished the look of PS2-era games like Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat or remembered the brown-tinted look of a B-tier Xbox 360 brawler.
Character models are another story. Captain Blood himself looks exactly like you’d expect—a square-jawed, long-coated grump with flowing hair and enough belts and buckles to make a Final Fantasy character jealous. His enemies mostly come in generic pirate or soldier flavors, and their animations range from rigid to full-on puppet show. Mouths move like they’re chewing invisible gum, and eyes often stare blankly past the camera as if dreaming of a better game to be in.
Cutscenes fare less well. They’re mostly composed of in-engine animations with camera angles that feel hastily arranged and dialogue syncing that flails around unpredictably. There’s kind of a B-movie energy to the whole thing—a "we made this with love and three shoestrings" aesthetic that makes the flaws oddly endearing.
Is Captain Blood Worth It?
Only If You Have $25 to Spare
When I first booted up Captain Blood, I wanted—truly wanted—to like it. I had my soda, I had my controller, and I had a heart open to jank. There’s something romantic about a game that took nearly two decades to wash ashore, patched together by an entirely different developer. And for the first hour or so, there’s a charm, I’ll admit: the overacted growls, the blood-spattered fights, the crunch of outdated animation sliding into modern resolution. It’s the kind of game you want to root for—at least until it starts actively working against you.
For $25, Captain Blood isn’t really asking for much on paper. In a world of $70 price tags and bloated open-world grinds, 25 bucks for a full campaign drenched in pirate violence might seem like a steal. But price alone doesn't dictate value, and while there's something admirable about the game’s low cost and zero-microtransaction stance, the truth is that you’re still paying for a deeply flawed game that feels like it should have been released a decade or so ago. And, if it did, I probably would have been all over the game.
Captain Blood is, in its own anachronistic way, a reminder of the strange mid-2000s B-game ecosystem—where every other week brought some overambitious, underfunded curiosity to store shelves. I wanted to love it. I really did. But some ships are too rotted to sail, and Captain Blood, for all its swagger, is one of them.
| Steam |
Nintendo |
||||
| PlayStation |
Xbox |
||||
| Price | $24.99 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Captain Blood FAQ
What platforms is Captain Blood available in?
Captain Blood is available on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox One.
Game8 Reviews
You may also like...
 |
Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall Review RPG, Simulation, Strategy |
 |
Creature Keeper Review Adventure, Action, RPG |
 |
Drug Dealer Simulator 2 Review Simulation |
 |
Atomfall Review Survival, Action, Adventure, RPG |
Captain Blood Product Information
|
|
| Title | CAPTAIN BLOOD |
|---|---|
| Release Date | May 6, 2025 |
| Developer | SeaWolf Studio General Arcade |
| Publisher | SNEG |
| Supported Platforms | PC (via Steam) Nintendo Switch PlayStation 5 PlayStation 4 Xbox Series X|S Xbox One |
| Genre | Action-Adventure, Hack and Slash |
| Number of Players | Single-Player (1) |
| ESRB Rating | ESRB M |
| Official Website | Captain Blood Official Twitter |
