Blood, Fang, and Edge

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Earthblood has me conflicted and not only because the title is very confusing so, we will be referring to the game simply as Werewolf for my own sanity for the rest of this review. The game itself has a lot to offer with the lore and visuals, visceral combat, and character dialogue, but fails in a few different areas that make the experience for me ring hollow, to feel an empty void in my soul. But somehow, I feel like that was the point, World of Darkness as a universe isn’t exactly a happy go lucky place, but that’s why I feel like the story that was chosen to be told ends up becoming unsatisfying by the end of the run time.

Werewolf starts off with a covert operation by the tribe of Tarker’s Mill, who our main protagonist, Cahal, is the second in command of his pack. The werewolves, or Garou, in the World of Darkness universe act as nature’s guardians, interfering with any attempts to deface or destroy nature with fang and claw. The initial characters have a lot of personalities, and there are a good amount of dialogue options, although I noticed that while different choices opened up small dialogue trees, your choices don’t end up affecting anything beyond what dialogue is presented before moving on. This takes place in the same universe as Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, but you wouldn’t know it, as no vampires or other supernatural creatures really show up which was a little disappointing because that’s how you really open up the universe and make it really interesting.

After interacting with your pack, you move onto the mission, sneaking amongst the Endron facility in order to take down the company and drive them off the land. The stealth is serviceable and I really appreciated the fact that you can sneak around every room and weaken the forces you might have to face or ignore them completely and move on undetected. But getting found doesn’t result in a game over, but simply transitioning the gameplay from stealth into action combat, Cahal explodes into his Werewolf form and starts tearing the security apart in a visceral display of blood and gore that leaves the room decimated but the alarm not going off? That is one of my biggest gripes is that even when you end up ripping an entire room apart the rest of the facility is somehow blissfully ignorant of your presence, although in the early stealth sections this isn’t the case.

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Besides these stealth/action segments of clearing rooms of enemies, there are some open-world segments that you have tasked side missions in, although these missions are usually just finding things, these side missions aren’t highlighted on the map at all, which made finding some of them very frustrating. There was a side mission near the end of the game where previously every side mission was only contained within the over world and not within the enemy structure. However, the game this time decided to switch it up but gave no indication this rule would change, making me look for the final objective for around 2 hours before moving on and finding it by looking around the facility, which frustrated me a bit.

The reward you get for completing missions is spirit points, and you can use them to upgrade Cahal in various ways, either choosing to upgrade his combat abilities if your only inclination is to tear the world apart with your claws. I choose to spend most of my upgrades on survivability and specific combat abilities and played through on Normal and found a reasonable challenge, although I wish you could block enemies when they start assaulting you with swarms.

The game’s music is right up this genre’s alley with emo punk rock playing over most of the action and fitting the tone for the brutal and dark universe that this game takes place in. I can’t deny that the edgy part of my soul still loved every second of Werewolf finally giving us a game that lets us play as the beasts, but by the end of the day, I resonated with the protagonist only because of how much he gets shafted throughout the campaign.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Cahal continually loses almost everyone that he cares about, to almost a brutal degree throughout the story of the campaign and that gave me an overwhelming sense of dread, that every character that was at least somewhat likable was on the chopping block and by the end of the campaign everyone but Cahal and one other main character are dead. There’s even an instance where a side character that was really likable, Dusk, is killed off screen, we don’t even get to see him die, which soured my opinion. It felt like they were being killed off for seemingly no reason, and when the final choice is to either kill the CEO that just killed your daughter or to save everyone who is left of your pack, I went back only because I didn’t want everyone to die, and half expected them to die anyway. Maybe it’s just the brutal nature of the World of Darkness universe, but I had really hoped that there would be at least a ray of hope, but the game ends suddenly and depressingly, with Cahal watching as the scumbag CEO gets away and ends on a real gut-wrenching low note.

SPOILERS FINISHED

After giving it a lot of thought, I really did enjoy my time with Werewolf. The universe and lore they establish are intriguing and interesting although I wish they had elaborated on it more in the game rather than leaving a lot of questions unanswered. The stealth gameplay is serviceable, and the action gameplay is cathartic and visceral, as you watch a power fantasy with emo metal music playing to a fever pitch. The visuals aren’t bad and the game itself is not at a bad price range at $40 for the amount of content in the actual game, although I’m also a sucker for the universe it takes place in and werewolves in general. I found a lot of hours of enjoyment from the title and I’m slightly interested to see Cahal’s story continue in some form, although a little apprehensive. The game I would say isn’t the best game I will play in 2021 but it is possibly the only one with such satisfying werewolves and that was worth it for me.

This review is based on a final code key provided by the publisher