Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is so bad it makes a case for robust backwards compatibility.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is bad. And I don't just mean the title. I didn’t expect the game to be good, since it looked like a budget release and has a Metacritic in the 50s, but I thought it might be a decently fun little B-game, kind of like The Order: 1886 with much lower production values. I had fun with that game and thought I might enjoy this one too. It’s a stealth/action game with some semi-open world exploration and a story based on the World of Darkness, an IP I have a fondness for. It seemed like it would be a pleasant little diversion between larger releases.

It was not.

So what is Werewolf, as a game? It’s a stealth action game based on the White Wolf tabletop RPG Werewolf: The Apocalypse. You play as Cahal, a middle aged Werewolf with almost no body fat as he battles to avenge his wife and fight against an evil corporation that seeks to corrupt and destroy the world in service of The Wyrm, a supernatural force at the heart of the Werewolf lore. The tutorial mission has Cahal and his pack engaged in some light sabotage at a base belonging to Endron, the evil corporation who serves as the game’s main antagonist. Things go bad, tragedy ensues, it’s all obvious and cliché stuff. Cut to five years later and Cahal who clearly hasn’t been drowning his sorrows in carbs because he’s still absolutely shredded despite being in his 50s and living the kind of lifestyle that doesn’t let you establish a good gym routine, is now some kind of ecoterrorism mercenary, driving around the country doing the same exact stuff he was doing before, but, for money. During your first mercenary mission you find out that your old pack is being targeted by the evil corporation and you go back to Tarker’s Mill to try and save them.

Gameplay revolves around 3 different forms that Cahal can take. There’s the lupus, or wolf, mode where you can stealth around and take out enemies by sneaking up behind them and then, for some reason, shifting to human form to knock them out. There’s the homid mode, where you interact with manmade objects like doors and computers or talk to people, as well as use a crossbow to kill enemies silently at range or sneak up behind them and stealth them wolf style, and there’s the Crinos, or full on werewolf, mode where you engage in combat. The Lupus mode is used for stealth and it mostly works, though the stealth mechanics are bad. Enemies in this game are absolutely brain dead and follow very basic stealth patterns, sometimes walking back and forth between a couple locations but mostly just standing still and waiting for you to take them out. Playing as a human mostly just involves hitting switches, though you are forced back into human form every time Cahal talks to one of his companions on his ear piece, which is frequent. Occasionally you can turn into a human and walk around in the open talking to people. The last form is Crinos, also known as full on werewolf, which you turn into whenever someone hurts you in wolf or human form, where you don't even have a life meter because the only penalty is being forced to turn Crinos and fight. This can lead to to hilarious moments where everyone is aware of you but you are still "stealth" killing people because you aren't forced to change until you get hurt and you can't be hurt during a stealth attack animation.

The game’s blend of styles sounds fine on paper, but in implementation it’s all deeply flawed. The wolf gameplay is beyond boring, mostly involving just avoiding the red circles on the ground cast by cameras and walking up behind enemies to hit square, which, again, inexplicably turns you into a human for the takedown. Even worse, you can’t do a takedown on the tougher enemies, so all you really accomplish is getting rid of a few enemies who you could kill in a single hit anyway. You can stealth through some areas and avoid combat if you want (and the game doesn’t give you XP for combat, so there’s really nothing to gain from it) and you do gain rage (which powers your special moves) from taking people down, so it’s not totally pointless, but there’s nothing satisfying about it. The main purpose to stealth is to damage “reinforcement doors” where new enemies come out, which reduces the health of those enemies. I can honestly say that playing as the dog Shadow in Dead to Rights: Retribution gave you more to do and a better experience, and that was a mediocre game from over a decade ago.

Human form is also used for stealth and mostly overlaps with the wolf, except it lets you fire the crossbow (to take out enemies or, more usefully, cameras and turrets) and interact with doors and computers. There’s not a lot of gameplay there. The main time you’ll actually stay a human is either when you’re back at the hub and talking to NPCs, or forced into the form to open a door or talk on your earpiece. There are segments where you’re playing as a human and “infiltrating” enemy areas and they are often incredibly stupid looking, like in a side mission where you interrogate a female scientist in a lab at a dam. Cahal wears a tactical denim vest and looks like a member of a motorcycle gang. The fact that the guards don’t interrogate him at all when he’s walking around the office, and that the woman buys his ludicrous claim to be a member of corporate security, just makes the whole episode seem absurd. I’ve worked in a corporate office, and if someone who looked like that started asking me questions and told me they worked for security I would have immediately called actual security to my office (in this case they were literally standing 10 feet away) or at the very least demanded to see credentials and have their identity confirmed. The game is full of bad story beats like that, such as when you show up back at your pack and your daughter is angry and standoffish towards you because of your absence. That’s fair enough, but like 90 minutes of playtime (and maybe a day or two in game) later she’s warmly telling you how glad she is that you came back, and all it took to restore the relationship was murdering a couple hundred of her colleagues at the evil corporation where she’s working undercover, and painting the facility’s walls with their blood. Characters have no consistency, and almost all the writing seems like it was done by a non-native speaker, full of awkward constructions and things nobody would ever say. The dialog feels bad and amateurish in a way that reminded me of bad games from the early PS3 era. Facial animation is terrible, and while the voice work for Cahal and other main characters is okay, some side characters definitely feel like they had Ned from accounting come down to read them rather than hiring a legitimate voice acting. At times it verges on so bad it’s good, but the quality of the main voice cast prevents it from rising/falling to that level. I will give the game credit for its dialog choice wheel, which represents what Cahal is thinking rather than offering a direct path of what to say, but since you only get two choices and nothing that you say actually matters in the game, it may get partial credit but it still very much earns a D for its dialog sections, along with everything else. There’s just way too much talking for a game that doesn’t do it well. Worst of all, the game is incredibly dour and self-serious. Characters have no sense of humor or even much character to them. It’s all presented as dry as stale dog kibble.

Playing as the Crinos should lead to visceral, impactful, combat as you shred puny humans as this hulking beast. Instead it just feels sloppy. The camera makes it hard to see who’s shooting at you, your character has no weight or momentum, instead just being kind of slow when you’re in damage mode and…somewhat faster in agility mode, and the animation is stiff and canned, with none of the interruptions or variations when you get hit that you expect from a modern game. There are a lot of moves available to Cahal, but none of them feel good and it’s hard to predict who Cahal will target or what exactly what he will do when you hit a button. Cahal is constantly swarmed by enemies in most encounters and I found myself wishing for a lower number of tougher foes that I could focus on. This happens from time to time in fights against supersoldiers, mechs or evil werewolves, called Black Spiral Dancers. These fights are slightly better, but suffer from the same issues of stiffness and bad animation that the rest do, and enemies basically ignore your swipes (though they take healthbar damage) and swipe right back, so it looks terrible and amateurish, as this 9 foot werewolf beats on this 6 foot muscle bound guy who doesn’t even flinch, and the muscle bound guy slashes the werewolf, who also doesn’t really respond, while both their health bars go down.

This is a $50 2021 release that looks like a cross between an early PS3 and early PS4 game, even though I was playing on PS5. Character models and environments are at about the level you’d expect from a game circa 2014, nowhere near the level of something like The Order, but probably acceptable at the dawn of the 8th generation. Not ideal for a 9th gen game, but understandable for a “budget” release. Animations, on the other hand, are terrible. In conversations characters just stand around while their mouths move. There’s no body language or movement, except for some recycled animations of people pointing at one another that often doesn’t work at all with what’s being said. Even when someone hands you an item they don’t animate doing so, they just verbally tell you they’ve given it to you. In combat none of the moves seem to connect convincingly and everything feels stiff and awkward. I’ve played through games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (both I and II!) and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West in recent years, so I have very recent knowledge of what 7th generation action games were actually like, not just hazy memories from a decade ago. They animated and played a lot better than this does. While hitting weaker enemies sends them ragdolling around, larger enemies simply don’t react at all to your attacks and the only indication you’re even connecting is a little sound and their lifebar dropping. Double Dragon on the Nintendo Entertainment System had better visual feedback from a landed attack.

Werewolf also has blatantly unfinished animations outside of how enemies react to you, such as when you swap the label on a shipping crate and the old one disappears replaced by the new one without any animation, like in a bad PS1 game. Or when reinforcements emerge out of a door by…just appearing in front of a darkened doorway as if by teleportation…like you’re playing a bad PS1 game. There are other visual issues like clipping problems and collision detection failures. I understand that this game didn’t have the budget of something like The Last of Us Part II and couldn’t feature carefully animated smooth interactions for every activity in the game. But most other games, even low budget games, have figured out how to deal with those issues over the past 25 years. Werewolf doesn’t bother doing things like creating a short off screen hallway for enemies to emerge from, or having enemies appear behind you where the camera can’t see them. It just plops them into the environment and has them start fighting you.

In addition, although the game’s environments look half-passable, they are monotonous and boring. This is a game about Werewolf warriors of Gaia and though there are a few small wilderness areas you spend the vast majority of the game in the blandest office and industrial facilities imaginable. It’s not just that they’re not as high fidelity as in a 9^th gen game like Watch Dogs: Legion, it’s that they’re flat out boring. Concrete industrial facilities and gray cubicle farms are bad environments to build your game around. I understand that it makes sense for the story they’re telling (the banality of an evil corporation; they look just like your workplace) but that story is bad and cliché too, and some visual pop would go a long way to making the game feel a little less dull. There’s a real sense of relief when you return to your forest hub and get to be in an area with some more color and interesting geometry. That’s thematically appropriate too, of course, but you don’t need to force the player to spend 80% of the game in ugly environments just to get across the message “corporate facilities bad, nature good.” Your themes are not that deep, bro. It’s also worth noting that the game’s “open world” hubs have the werewolves living about 100 feet away from the evil corporation’s facilities, and it all comes off as absurd and unrealistic. At least that means it’s easy to move on to the next level, but they’d probably have been better off with some kind of loading screen between the two places to indicate that you’ve gone some distance, rather than going from your daughter’s bedroom directly to the enemy pumping sites and traveling about the same distance as I do in real life when popping down to the corner store to pick up some bananas.

The game is also wildly behind the times when it comes to dealing with sex and race. Cahal’s wife gets murdered in front of him at the start of the game, which causes his exile, and his daughter being in peril is his main motivation for returning and most of what he does during the game. The way that story resolves gives the daughter zero agency and made me angry at the writers. Later in the game Cahal rescues a Native American pack leader, and then teaches her and her pack the right way to be a werewolf, and given the ways in which the game uses Native American imagery and just the fact that it’s 2021, having a white guy as the literal savior of a pack of Native American werewolves is just outright offensive. It’s clearly not the game’s intention to be racist, or sexist. Cahal’s best friend is a black woman computer hacker and the game has a lot of messages about how humans and werewolves should co-exist, but like everything else in the game this attempt is deeply flawed.

I mentioned Dead to Rights: Retribution in reference to the game’s wolf segments, but honestly that game is a blueprint for what I wish this game had been. Dead to Rights Retribution was not a top tier 360 game, and it knew it. It was a mid budget action brawler with a dumb story, and while on the surface it also played things straight it at least let you do fun and wacky things like bite enemies in the testicles as the dog, or disarm bad guys and shoot them in the head in cool, gory sequences. Werewolf has executions, but they’re not visceral enough to matter, and have the same choppy animation that everything else does, making them visually hard to follow. Dead to Rights had flamboyant gangs of bad guys and some variety in environments. It was a dumb, fun, time, which was what I was hoping to get here, but didn’t. Werewolf is just too bad and takes itself far too seriously.

Is there anything good about Werewolf? At times when you’re exploring a naturalistic area it can look nice. It has some basic RPG elements so it can mildly fun to unlock new skills or attributes, and XP is awarded for story advancement or hunting down “spirit” collectables in the environment, which generally hang out near some piece of nature or Native American culture like a plant growing through the floor of a warehouse or a little stone statute on someone’s desk. Finding collectibles is always at least a little satisfying. The game isn’t a miserable experience, though it’s something of a slog, and as you gain abilities and adjust to the controls it gets marginally better. It’s not buggy or glitchy or frustrating (in fact it’s very easy) so there are time when you’re playing and the dialog isn’t so bad, and you’re in one of the better environments searching for a spirit so you can get a useful upgrade, when it rises to the level of an okay time.

You can see the bones of a better game underneath this. Based on the structure (with lots of story and some sidequests woven in) it seems like at one point it might have been intended as an open world game or a full RPG and been cut back to the mostly linear action title it is. If it were a little more open and the combat and…everything else…felt better then I could see this being a decent time. The concept of a werewolf game blending stealth and bloody action with a story about taking down an evil corporation isn’t inherently a bad one, and no aspect of the game’s gameplay is conceptually flawed, it’s just bad in its execution. If the guards pathed a little better. If the enemies reacted to your hits in combat. If the environments were more interesting. If if if.

There’s no reason to play Werewolf. I’m a casual fan of the source material, but while it’s woven throughout the game’s narrative, it’s not used in an interesting way. You’ll hear terms like Garou and Penumbra but nothing of value is done with them.

I’m sure the people who developed this game didn’t set out to create something terrible. They had good intentions and it seems like time and budget made it impossible for them to complete their vision. Maybe Covid played a role. Maybe the Wyrm used its powerful minions to prevent them from finishing the game and getting their environmental message out there. It doesn’t really matter. There’s no point in playing this game. I spent about $30 on it and that was a complete waste of money.

There are so many good games out there that all of us haven’t played that there’s just no reason for a product like Werewolf. I can probably name 100 PS3/360 games that are more entertaining and interesting; even mediocre ones. While game design and tech continues to move forward, it’s not at such a fast pace that the games of the past are made irrelevant. I’m sure that part of the intention of not making it easier to play older games is to drive sales towards games like Werewolf, but that’s not good for the industry in the long run. My experience with Werewolf has made me more hesitant about buying AA games with mediocre reviews going forward. $30 is not a lot of money and 10 hours isn’t a huge amount of time, but I could have been playing one of my backlog games I’d actually enjoy. I certainly got more out of even a mediocre game like Homefront than I did out of this, and that was 6 months ago, not ancient history. Werewolf was clearly intended to take advantage of the 9^th gen launch window and put out a substandard product that people would buy to have something for their new machines. I guess I fell for it, even though I waited for a sale. But just being a 9^th gen game doesn’t actually mean anything if it’s bad. I still have a lot of better games in my backlog that I can play, and I’d be much better off playing them than spending any more time with games like this.

And the name is really dumb.

Thanks for going really in depth with this, I was thinking about picking it up myself someday (on deep sale) because werewolves are cool and not often playable characters and I could justify it for a mediocre podcast listening game but it just sounds like, bad. Or maybe not straight bad but completely dull, which isn't much better.

@snaketelegraph: You're very welcome. I had to get my frustration off my chest.

I would say that this is a legitimately bad game. Not the worst game, but it goes past completely dull to flat out bad with some of its design decisions.

There are all kinds of issues that I didn't get into, like the fact that later enemies have to be defeated twice because they transform after the first defeat, and that means you often are standing around after a combat wave waiting for the enemies to resurrect, at which point you defeat them again and then the next wave of enemies comes out and you defeat them and then wait for THEM to resurrect...

Or how boring the upgrade tree and abilities really are.

It's not completely awful to play and if you were stuck on a transatlantic flight with the only choice being play this or do nothing I would say go ahead and play it, but even for a podcast game there are better choices out there, and if you have a platform that this is on you MUST have access to at least some of those better choices that you haven't played yet.

I really wanted to like this game too. I'm a fan of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and B games so it seemed like a good fit. Instead I basically had to force myself to finish it just so I could complain about it without the risk that it gets better later on. It does get better in the later sections, but it never gets not bad.

Like you, after seeing the quick look, I thought, "this looks like some B-tier fun!"

Glad someone else bit the bullet to find out. Sorry you found out it was bad firsthand.

Posted this in the QL comments when that came out, but all of my hopes for this being even a decent gory brawler with a werewolf pretty much washed away when I found out that Cyanide was the developer.

@lapsariangiraff: Yeah it's a bummer, especially because Cyanide Studio has a reasonable track record of B-tier games like Blood Bowl 2, Styx, and Call of Cthulu. None are masterpieces but they've all got their defenders and their good aspects.

This feels like a game that might have been a victim of Covid, where they just couldn't finish what they wanted so they made sure it that it was completable and acceptable on a technical level (it has graphical issues but it never crashed or bugged out too badly) and fulfilled whatever their obligation was to the publisher and the licensor. So much of the game feels like it was "just get it functional," especially the rudimentary stealth stuff, given the studio's pedigree, and the fact that larger enemies don't react at all to your attacks. If you're making a game where you play a 9 foot werewolf you'd think that making the player feel like a monster in combat would be a priority, and they do with the smaller enemies who you can pick up and execute or throw around, but the bigger enemies literally just don't react, and that feels like a time and budget thing.

Just a bummer. Maybe their next game will be better.

What a bummer. Like you, I have a fondness for all the World of Darkness properties, and I've been toying with running a tabletop Werewolf game when life starts returning to normal.

I thought this game might be worth a look when it inevitably gets a deep discount. After reading this, man, I dunno. Pardon the expression but... woof.

Like you I really wanted this to be an "okay" middle tier thing, but from the start this always seemed destined to be this era's "Dark", which if nobody remembers was a crappy late gen stealth vampire game on the 360.

Some of my favorite memories of high school and college are playing tabletop WoD games. Every single thing about this makes me sad (except for those awesome looking spirits). I might have told my past self to REALLY sink my teeth into those isometric Hunter: The Reckoning games, cause APPARENTLY those are the best we're going to get (yeah, I like Vampire Bloodlines, but c'mon, any game where you have to have a list of mods to install to make it basically playable is a tough recommend).

It's a SLAMDUNK setting, it can be grimdark, it can be funny, it can be BOTH, but it just feels like no devs ever get a chance to really go wild with it...or should I say Frenzy with it?

Oddly enough, the Visual Novel tie-in games for this game AND Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 are surprisingly well-done... for the most part.

Thanks for the indepth writing on this. Definitly would've been one of those 'i get it for 5$' type of games for me based on GB's quick look.

@undeadpool: I think that World of Darkness suffers the same fate that Warhammer does, in that it's a slightly B-tier IP that ends up being licensed by B and C tier game developers who try to cram all that richness and lore and mechanical goodness into what they're making, and end up with something overstuffed and undercooked. Cyanide isn't really a combat developer, they have previously been focused on stealth games, and here they tried to make a game that had two main modes of play and a rich story and they just could not get any of it right.

Of course that does mean that like with Warhammer there's the potential that at least some of the games can be good, so I'm still optimistic someone will get it right. There are a bunch of great Warhammer games mixed in with the gallons of crap. World of Darkness just has fewer adaptations.

@zombiepie mentioned that the Visual Novel games that were recently released are good, and they seem well reviewed, so I'm interested in trying them out. Probably not for a bit though because this game really did leave a bad taste in my mouth. But I think that at some point there will be a game that really gets the setting right, and then hopefully there will be more of them. You're right that it's very ripe for a lot of great games of a lot of different varieties.

I saw adult film actor Jason Luv praising this game on TikTok.

@supermonkey122: I think everyone can safely ignore my criticisms. If Jason Luv likes the game then it's a banger, just like he is (pun very much intended.) Or maybe it's just his way of giving his audience the opportunity to get screwed by him for only $30 or so.

Or he just respects the heck out of Cahal's work out ethic and physique. It seems like Mr. Luv is also into maintaining his body so he might dig a game about a guy in his 50s who still has abs you could grate cheese on.

@bigsocrates: Also like Warhammer it has a STRANGE history of appealing to some very unpleasant corners of the internet.

But Warhammer at least has some solid bangers to show for all that shit, WoD is like panning for gold in a sewage runoff river.

You've summarized everything perfectly with those photo captions. I dont want to be running around weird industrial complexes as a Werewolf.

I want to be selecting different color flannels for my human form while exploring lush West Coast Mountain landscapes and sleepy logging towns while fighting vampires.

Sparkles and jean cut-offs optional.

@bigsocrates said:

@lapsariangiraff: Yeah it's a bummer, especially because Cyanide Studio has a reasonable track record of B-tier games like Blood Bowl 2, Styx, and Call of Cthulu. None are masterpieces but they've all got their defenders and their good aspects.

This feels like a game that might have been a victim of Covid, where they just couldn't finish what they wanted so they made sure it that it was completable and acceptable on a technical level (it has graphical issues but it never crashed or bugged out too badly) and fulfilled whatever their obligation was to the publisher and the licensor. So much of the game feels like it was "just get it functional," especially the rudimentary stealth stuff, given the studio's pedigree, and the fact that larger enemies don't react at all to your attacks. If you're making a game where you play a 9 foot werewolf you'd think that making the player feel like a monster in combat would be a priority, and they do with the smaller enemies who you can pick up and execute or throw around, but the bigger enemies literally just don't react, and that feels like a time and budget thing.

Just a bummer. Maybe their next game will be better.

@junkerman: The sparkles may be optional but the jean shorts are MANDATORY!

It is strange that the developers of this game thought "you know what people LOVE about werewolf games? The part where you sneak around offices looking at memos. That's the werewolf fantasy!"