Donny Grimm’s Blood Drive Review

I was never one for driving games…or driving at all. I work from home, so I was surprised when I found myself buying Blood Drive off of a bargain rack knowing full well what I was getting myself into. The back read “brains, stains and automobiles” so I thought to myself, it must be okay, right? Well it was. Even though it flew under the radar in terms of advertisement it still managed to nab a feature game price of fifty to sixty buck and I still can’t believe that I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t worth that, but enough about price let’s talk gameplay.

For anyone who’s played Twisted Metal, Monster Jam, or even the Terror is Reality minigame in Dead Rising 2, you will know pretty much exactly how this game will play out. You drive a car…or a truck…or an ambulance or some variation of those depending on who you choose to play as. You drive that variation in an arena which could be anything from an abandoned airport to a Las Vegas-esque casino strip. The gameplay is NOT disappointing. How can it be? “Big guns on fast cars” is pretty self explanatory and it’s always fun to mow down a crowd of shamblers with a minigun. That said, things can get severely repetitive after a few rounds.

How about the art? The cars are pretty generic and expected, but well designed and imposing on the screen. The characters are another story. Each “blood driver” is unique and well designed. Just by looking at them you can feel that there has got to be something worth finding out about them. But if that’s what you’re looking for you might as well just look up their endgame videos on YouTube.

What about story? You really can’t expect much from a shoot ’em up, zombie killing, driving game, but they did throw in a sort of explanation as to why you are even there shooting, killing and driving. The Blood Drive is a brutal new game show that takes place in Las Ruletas where the goal is either kill the zombies, kill each other, or race to the checkpoints while killing everything…or some variation of those three. It provides a mildly amusing back story you can forget while you’re running over a shambler’s cranium. As well as the shambler models being creatively designed, there are also three other unique types of zombies: The lobber, the leaper and the behemoth. The lobber is a bloated ranged attacker…as usual, its acid it sprays at your car. Just think L4D2 spitter. The Leaper is the flea of the zombies, weak but can jump far as shit and lands on your car slowly whittling away your health much like the hunter…again L4D. Finally the behemoth…do I really have to explain? Just think tank L4D or Panzer? It really doesn’t matter. It’s true I am biased to games with zombies in them, but this is a deal at ten bucks. Fifty or sixty? Not so much. Just wait a month for the prices to drop. Highly recommended to zombie fanatics………Twilight sucks.

Final Score: 3/5

– Donny Grimm