An extremely basic game, Bloody Walls is a 2D action game which combines simple gameplay with Game Boy or NES style pixel graphics.
Bloody Walls is very simplistic – you control a man with a gun. He has some antidotes on him. Each antidote keeps him safe for 60 seconds, and they automatically are used as the last one expires.
You start out on the first of ten floors, where there are five mission-givers and a store – a store at which you can exchange antidotes for guns and mines. There are two guns other than the starting one – a SMG with slightly worse range but much better damage, and a shotgun with vastly worse range but massively more damage (and a slow reload speed). Mines can simply be deployed by clicking on them or pressing 3 or 4 (whichever slot they are loaded into), which causes them to be deployed at your feet. You can’t run over them, but your enemies can.
You have a limited amount of inventory space – 20 weight, and your gun takes up a chunk of that. The mines will generally occupy the rest unless you buy two guns for some crazy reason (you can sell your original one, too).
Each of the quest givers shows you a location in the levels below, though you don’t have to talk to them beforehand to get the relevant items. The quests are fulfilled simply by opening up a container on that level, and then bringing it back to your buddy on the first floor for a reward in a nearby locker.
The actual gamplay itself consists of shooting monsters in the vulnerable parts as they come towards you. There’s a small variety of enemies, but ultimately most of the types are pretty much the same save for hit points and movement speed. If any enemy touches you, you die and have to start the entire game over. But the game is very, very short – only ten floors, and most of the floors can be cleared within a minute each, with a couple exceptions.
The main exceptions to the general rule of “all the enemies are the same” come towards the end, when you encounter enemies which only are vulnerable if you’re far enough away from them, enemies which only open up when you’re right next to them, and enemy spawners which periodically deploy an enemy after you. These three things are the most dangerous kinds of enemies, though the spawners are ultimately easily dispatched after you’ve killed everything else. That said, they are *tedious* to dispatch, sometimes taking several minutes to get through the enemies they send at you before you can kill them all.
While in theory you are in danger of your time running out, in practice, it never happened to me; the real threat was the enemies.
But there really isn’t much variety here; the levels do vary slightly but they are almost identical from playthrough to playthrough, and frankly, there’s very little of interest to note here. Beating the game plays a very short cutscene, and then the game is over.
The whole thing is very minimalist, but ultimately, it is a fairly basic tactical challenge, and not even a very complicated one at that – there’s really a basic strategy which works on every level, and the only thing that the mines are for is so that if you screw up a bit you can avoid losing. The amount of clicking you have to do is kind of tiresome, and can make your wrist sore after a bit.
I can’t really recommend this game. It isn’t terrible, but ultimately it is a kind of forgettable experience that doesn’t really go anywhere.
.5