Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood Won’t Have You Howling

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I’m a big fan of the World of Darkness family of table-top role-playing games (TTRPG) and have hosted many a night with one of their source books like Vampire: The Masquerade or Mummy: The Resurrection. I’ve also purchased all of their video games for good or ill. 

Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is the latest entry in the World of Darkness video game library. It’s an interesting game to say the least and different in gameplay and design compared to Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and that game’s more RPG-focused gameplay. Developed by Cyanide Studios — which also developed games like the Styx series and the Blood Bowl series — and published by Nacon, Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is a third-person action-adventure game that has you playing a shapeshifting man by the name of Cahal who along with his tribe have been waging a war against a massive company that has taken to destroying the land. The game takes place in the American Northwest and has the player traveling to different sites run by this corrupt company called Endron as if that wasn’t a bit too much on the nose enough for a game about eco-terrorists fighting against a corrupt company. Its story and gameplay skews to being serious which made the play on the company’s name a bit off putting within the tone of the game.

The game writing seems to assume that the player is already familiar with the lore surrounding it as it routinely throws out things like Fomori and Wyrm without providing much in the way of direct information, and instead the player was expected to draw context only from the sentence the term is in. The spoken dialogue itself was often stilted and lacked much in the way of emotion especially coming from the main character Cahal. Despite needing to control the rage inherent within every werewolf, he seemed to be a man of few words and most of them conveyed in an almost robotic fashion even during scenes of emotional immersion. On occasion the tone of the dialogue would shift and thaw but only for the briefest of moments before flickering back toward its stiff and robotic tone. I wish that in a game about eco-terrorism and controlling the beast within there would have been more struggle in terms of that personal growth and much more conveyed of the fight against the rage that threatens to consume the soul of the werewolf who lets the rage take over.

The game does a much better job of using a basic stealth mechanic to have you infiltrate the various locations. Your human form allows you to access computer systems with a basic setup (disable camera feeds, open doors and disable other things). When I say basic I mean that the “evil” company seemed to lack an understanding of security which included not having anything approaching a password protected terminal. You simply had to reach the terminal to access it. Your secondary form as Cahal is a wolf with the ability to sneak through vents and run a bit faster and … not much else. You automatically shift to your human form to make kills and to the credit of the developers the kills were quick and the levels designed well enough to facilitate such things. Meanwhile your third form is that of the powerful werewolf. I feel the developers really captured the look and feel of turning into a 10-foot tall, raging beast that shredded soldiers, and the included heavy metal music when you changed really added to the intensity of the whole thing. The werewolf form has two stances to switch between known as “agile” and “heavy,” with one providing faster moving and healing and the other sacrificing speed for devastating attacks. In all honesty I find that I seldom even remember to switch between the two stances as the basic skill upgrade system that I maxed out really early on simply meant that most of the fights I got into were already heavily in my favor. 

About fights — the ability to turn into a raging werewolf is amazing but it almost negates the need for stealth as most if not all rooms you can simply bulldoze your way through without needing to narrow down the opposition in any tangible way that would matter. Since there’s no real incentive to stealth around the map it really just makes it more of a player choice to do so. Sometimes it’s nice to have that incentive through a reward or simply to make it easier for the player to navigate the level while minimizing the threats but since the balance remains the same regardless of if you go loud or quiet, in the end it simply negates the need to be quet. The stealth mechanic itself is spotty as the sometimes the enemy A.I. can stand right in front of you while you hide behind a barrier and they won’t see you but then sometimes you slip out of cover for a brief moment and it’s like they had laser optics to see you right away. It only happens seldomly and once I realized the stealth mechanics didn’t matter in terms of level progression I simply just accepted the odd glitch and went full werewolf mode to compensate.

The animation and character design left a lot to be desired, as from a distance the level design looked nice and crisp but up close the NPC’s looked dead eyed and whenever they gestured towards something their arms became comically weird and distorted. You never see your enemies run away in terror or even really acknowledge that you are something other than just a really hairy, giant man on a rampage. Either these are the most battle-hardened guards in corporate security or they are so brain dead that they lack the programmed ability to flee, flank or do anything but either charge in with blunt weapons or shoot from range with rifles. Occasionally they fired silver bullets that lower your health/health regeneration during the battle and later enemies would become stronger through an in-game plot device made to give you more of a challenge, But even then that challenge is barely enough and the fact that they continue to simply charge in means that you can regenerate your energy level and heal well enough to finish the fight without a lot of effort.

I understand that being an action game it might be hard to utilize the robust lore associated with the TTRPG versions, as in the lore there are terrible penalties for succumbing to rage. Going by what I’ve read, earlier in the development cycle there would have been a penalty if you didn’t routinely “release” that rage. It seems that they stripped out that sort of system. I would have thought that its inclusion would have added to the gameplay and brought it in line more with the lore and would have added more of a depth to the gameplay and the story itself. I enjoyed the game overall despite its shortcomings and I would give it a 3 out of 5 for being kinda enjoyable but still lackluster in so many other regards that I’m not willing to add in another star to the rating.