The Bloodline

very good potential. hoping to see it have original ideas and not become a cookie cutter RPG

A game that puts fun before everything else. This game has the balls modern RPGs WISH they could have.

really fun game to just kill time grind materials and just do whatever you want i think this would do great with mod support

If you like the idea of a giant sandbox for your not-so-serious open world fantasy RPG, then this will be the place to be. Eventually. Probably. The foundation of The Bloodline is solid, and the potential is massive.

The skill system is great, there are no "classes" as such, just a wide variety of skills to pick and choose whatever play-style tickles your fancy. Equipment choices are similarly unrestricted. So you can play as your favourite fantasy trope character, or mix together whatever fist-fighting, fireball-slinging, flintlock rifle-wielding, priestly vampire blood-mage bard-in-their-underwear your imagination comes up with.

Then after a brief introduction you are cast into the wide world to do whatever you wish. Go on an epic quest, help a bunch of villagers, or go on a murder spree. Mine some ores, chop some trees and build yourself an arsenal of weapons. Or build a peaceful little village of crop-farming necromancers. Or all of the above.

BUT.

It's a big but for a reason. As of writing, many of these systems are unfinished, unbalanced, missing, buggy, or all of the above. It's early access, and it shows in many areas. Parts of the map that look interesting will be empty, or labelled as work in progress when you get there. Many of the skill trees are yet to be fleshed out. Quests will break or straight up be labelled as WIP. Much of the village building aspect is still "coming soon". You might fall through the map in places, the game might crash, or brick your save (make backups!).

In spite of this, The Bloodline is a ton of fun. Even in its current state I've had a blast, and keep coming back for more. Worth the price as is, and still actively improving. Definitely recommend to support ongoing development.

This is a single player game whose fun was ruined in the name of "balance" as if it's a competitive multiplayer shooter. Thanks for ruining the grappling hook with your latest patch. Uninstalled while waiting for mod support, the grappling hook skill tree, and/or a revert on the changes.

This has some promise but everything in the game you might want to do is heavily captioned within as a placeholder, everything is work in progress, and the game is very, very buggy.
Combat is kind of fun, there are some fun areas, but it feels very hollow and skin deep right now.
It's not a bad concept, but it's very WIP.
Some EA titles are Beta releases, meaning feature complete but buggy, and maybe some extended features need to be added.
Some are Alpha, meaning they have a rough outline but there are still unfinished features and implemented ideas to work out.

This is DEFINITELY an alpha release.

A lot of potential, fun, sometimes frustrating, needs controller support. It's sort of "Mine-rim", but not in a bad way.

game is awesome! understand it's in early access... but i WISH i could play this with my son, going on adventures and just having fun. he loves the game and so do i. PLEASE please please... add coop.

this game's potential is unreal and the scope seems to be amazing. there is already really solid foundations from crafting to overall exploration and dungeon crawling. from what i have heard this is the work from a single developer which makes it even more impressive. there is absolutely a lot of space for improvement like the UI and menus of the game, but what is there so far is impressive. there are quite a few interesting and fun skill trees, like being a bloodmage, necromancer or druid. the combat is fun and fluid and the ragdolls from enemies are downright hilarious. this next to hades 2 might be the only early access game i am genuinely incredibly looking forward to seeing the progress of. updates seem to come fairly often and usually of very good size. if the developer keeps going in this direction i can see this in a year or a few as one of those "must play indie" titles.

this game is great so much potential but i would hold off on buying until more is added and optomization is done to stabalize this beast

The game has spear weapons.
Oblivion and Skyrim didn't.
The better game is obvious.

It's still currently really jank, but seems to be getting frequent updates. And the game itself is quite fun despite the jank, really ambitious for an indie dev. The core stuff of the game is all there; an interesting mix of exploring in first-person and traveling in the overworld, lots of things to collect, small quests to do, really fun combat, lots of interesting abilities to try out, etc.

I'm hoping the jank is ironed out over time, and that this game can be a great polished experience. Seems the game is still being actively updated, so I'd say it's only a matter of time.

The game has a lot of potential, but climbing needs to be fixed or removed. I cant get through the first main story dungeon without clipping out of the map.

I played because I saw it had a ton of great reviews and it had magic that looked interesting, but holy s*** is it clunky. Its borderline unplayable because the fps issues, that were pointed out 2 years ago from what i can tell, are still there. The whole thing feels like it was just released and still needs to be cleaned up, de-cluttered, and optimized for the player (they are trying to do to much too early). The tutorial needs a ton of work.

Is this a good game? No. I played it for an hour and a half and I'm not sure if/when I'm going to play it again.

BUT

It's a HILARIOUS game. Unlike modern hyper-curated experiences where the devs are obsessed with making sure nothing fun happens, this game lets hilarious and crazy things happen and the experience is fun as a result. If you want a goofy sandbox, 100% buy this, you will not regret it.

Lots of potential. combat is great, i personally like the minigame-based skill progression. the main annoying bug I've run into is the mouse sensitivity changing randomly. A lot of areas to explore, but often empty castles/caves/villages, so obviously unfinished. Will probably put it down for a bit to give the developer time, but i don't regret paying full price to support the game. Developer seems very involved with the community which is awesome

It's been in EA for a 16 months and it looks like it's going to be a long while before it's out of EA. There are so very many replicatable, nearly guaranteed bugs that happen constantly. Gameplay bugs, menu bugs, camera/visual bugs, animation bugs, so very many bugs. I cannot stress enough how buggy this game is.

On top of the bugs, most areas of interest as 'Work In Progress', with half of these unfinished miniprojects getting a popup label to tell you so. Additionally, the skill trees are wildly unbalanced and most abilities are unfinished. Some of the game systems are unfinished.

There's no way this is done and ready within another 16 months.

And that's why you should be intrigued by the positive reviews. Despite the absolute janketyjank that happens in this game, it's still quite fun and worth the asking price.

Please add controller support! I'm not able to play games with keyboard and mouse so I still haven't been able to play this game since I bought it at launch

This game is beyond good.

It has everything you would want in a "open world" type world and rpg. The amount of skills you can mess around with is fun. You can do magic that has many sub elements and things like necromancy. You can use skills with different weapons and use 2 sets of skills and then switch to a different weapon and switch skills for it. Ive restarted over 8 times to make new builds and the story is great but not finished. Cant wait what else this game will offer. Hyped for full release whenever that will be and to see peoples reaction when they discover this fun game.

The game is, as of now, february 25, very very fun. i like the systems and combat already in place, the grafiphical style, and the story as well. and i can see its potential, so much potential. the villlages and cities are so nice already, even with parts clearly missing (paladins/Palace tbd). i especially like the handcrafted areas i have seen so far. its a ton of fun, and i can(t) wait to see what it will be like when its released :)

Very fun. Just spent 30 minutes reading cryomancy books only to find out there's a whole world more. Keep tabs on this one.

The game is unfinished... obviously
yeah, but the game is still pretty good.

Word for the devs
If the game is meant to be something similar to mount and blade with magic and cool stuff then ok, it might be great to actually be able to recruit people.

If the game is meant for us as the player to mainly travel alone, then maybe make the game entirely open world?

yeah i dunno

I really like the concepts in this game and the mechanics it brings to the table. The combat is genuinely pretty engaging and even the ragdoll related mechanics are fun to mess with. Unarmed combat feels good (ish) and most magic is unique, especially considering they have summoning, transformation, etc. non-damage spells.

But it needs a LOT of polish. I thought the same thing a year ago (when I last played), then I tried it again recently and realized pretty much everything I thought was an issue back then is still a problem. A year ago I excused it as early access, now I consider it a bit of a fundamental flaw, unfortunately.

That being said, if some of what I'm about to talk about gets fixed, I'd be happy to try again and change my review.

1. Saving in a cave of seemingly any kind permanently ruins that save, because you'll repeatedly spawn under the world every time you reload.

2. You will get stuck on EVERYTHING. On trees, on the world map (somehow), everywhere. It happens so much they seem to have added the ability to (with no restrictions) just teleport anywhere on the worldmap with a click, which is hilarious since you can just teleport instead of walking from minute zero.

3. While the spells are cool, they're SO buggy that I'm frequently skeptical when I read a spell description if that's actually how it'll work. Most dashes or jump attacks are more or less just a fast jump without much direction, a lot of the described effects are missing tons of necessary info (at least necromancy has a lot of these), and in general movement abilities are terrifying because basically all of them have gotten me stuck at least once.

4. Any enemy type besides an ambush (camps, dens, fortresses) is almost impossible to find. Trying to do melee builds that use stamina is frustrating because I have to expend 75% of my stamina sprinting all over the battle map just trying to find the camp I'll beat up in ten seconds.

5. And that's the other thing: none of the enemies are really that much of a challenge? I don't seem to even need equipment to utterly decimate pretty much every single enemy I've come across, and that's with a melee build. Magic makes every single fight trivial.

6. Because of that, I don't even think you need weapons or gear, and if you did, it'd be a disaster, because the "cool" areas like the temples and castles are both A. way too big and B. devoid of anything particularly interesting loot-wise or enemy-wise.

7. Lastly... everything feels kind of slow and too big. The world map is huge, the battle maps are unnecessarily massive, all resources are in huge supply, loading times feel just long enough to be annoying... You get the idea.

All in all, it's a really fun game wrapped up in a metric ton of frustrating issues. It's not even exactly that buggy besides the stuck problems, but the game spoils the player so much that you don't need to walk, don't need to get items (if you can even find any worth using anyway), barely need new magic/abilities, and don't (in my opinion) make interesting improvements as you level up.

It's a super rare case of a game that feels like it's bending over for you at every turn, to the extent that it makes it less interesting and dramatically less engaging than it could be. I hope this stuff is fixed! It seems like it'd be very fun if it was.

This game has easily made its way into my top 5s. Made by a single developer whose extremely active in the community and frequently has updates. Minor bugs due to being still under development but where it sits right now it is definitely playable. Ive logged all hours of playtime through my steam deck as well so its definitely compatible.

It's okay-ish. For as okay as something with Synty assets mixed with AI voice dialogue can be. It was a lot more fun before all avenues of fun were nerfed into the ground for the sake of balance. Last I checked, it's a single player game and it doesn't matter how ridiculous it seems zipping around with the grappling hook or nuking stuff from across the screen. Let the game have its fun. Don't keep ripping it out for minute balance checks.

A Labor of Love with a solid foundation

Ive been following this game for the better part of 2 years now and have watched it go from a cool arena fighting demo to an open world sandbox

theres lots of skills and different classes to play around with and were the game stands now youre not stuck choosing any one path, bored of playing necro switch to a ranger, get bored of that move to warrior

the map is large and filled with many zones for you to explore. while every square inch isnt filled with stuff to find like skyrim the areas that are complete are straight to the point and fun to explore.

mundane tasks like gathering ore and chopping wood as well as foraging feel like piece of candy type moment. it can be tedious but the minigames keep you engaged and make it hard to stop

while the cities are large they dont feel very engaging, so far ive seen no point in spending any time in them besides the various quest with a vague hint of some cool weaponry if you do this random npcs fetch quest, granted ive only played for a handful of hours

the overworld is cool but again not very engaging other than the popup fights or occasional merchant caravan

this game pulls inspiration from mutliple sources a few that come to mind would be skyrim, runescape, wow and it blends them all together surprisingly well

if i had anything id like to see from the game in the future it would be major repairs on some of the bugs. goblins floating into the distance, getting stuck in animations, mounts not working correctly, the game needs a lot of polish for sure but i know the devs are working dilligently

even though i know its a far way off if on the roadmap at all co op would make this spectacular. controller support as well which i know has been announced

In summary im glad i bought this game and i support the devs whole heartedly and look forward to what they have in store for us in the future

I am enjoying myself! It is a fun sandbox. I am excited for the game to be more complete.

It's a slightly janky, unfinished game that has a lot of fun stuff going on. The World gives a decent reason to explore, the minigames for crafting and resource collecting are pretty engaging, the variety of skills is impressive. The graphics are good enough to not hurt the eyes, but low enough to not overwhelm my cheap laptop. I would love to see this get multiplayer capabilities when it is more fleshed out

Despite being in early access currently, has enough content to keep you busy for hours. it is currently a high suggestion while it is as cheap as it is, we know that most game companies start hiking prices closer to release.

Good game, will eventually be skyrim but better

10/10 would pay full price again. Low poly, but combat is amazing and the game receives frequent updates.

Fantastic game made by a solo dev, Milo obviously puts a lot of time and passion into this game and it shows. While it may not have super high end graphics or a story that pulls on your heart strings it is an absolute blast to play. You are able to build your character and play with a TON of freedom be it using magic, melee, or ranged weapons, and beating your enemies senseless and sending them ragdolling down a cliff will never not be satisfying. The game receives consistent updates and I look forward to seeing it completed one day.

Seems a bit basic at first but as you start playing there are more things you can do and honestly its simplicity makes this a surprisingly relaxing game that I can just turn on and play while listening to music or watching youtube on the side. It is a great game to just build up your homebase and your character. I hope devs keep it up and add more things!

If you just want to beat the living hell out of everything you see, in as many ways as possible, get the game. Its early access still, but the BONES of this game are hours and hours of fun. I went unarmed for my first few hours of gameplay and man is it fun just punching huge cave trolls into dust and throwing their friends into lava pits.

Is it still early access and janky? You bet, but it's also a lot of fun. Sending goblins flying or yanking the ones that dare to use a jetpack out of the sky to send them crashing into the earth never grows old. Really excited for this one and to see it go to completion.

one of the best rpg's out there with great mechanics both in combat and outside the only thing its lacking is a bit of polish and more content other wise its worth every cent

I found my new happy place...

This game, 100%, fits me like a glove. It combines all the things I love from my favourite games all in one place. It's single-player and I can choose exactly how I want to play it. I don't have to die of hunger and thirst and grind for food and water like in some other games (I think?), but I can grind my levels in equipment, armour etc, in a fun way doing quests, exploration, looking for trouble if I feel like it lol, and so on. I'm totally hooked and back to the game I go, haha. That's me gone. By the way, the fact that this game was made by 1 developer only has fantastic soundtrack in-game, spectacular scenery and open world feel, just blows my mind, it's won multiple awards, now I see why.

My personal review score overall of 'The Bloodline'...

A well deserved rating of...

10/10

5/5

This game moves to the top of my favourite list to play.

Game is definitely in Early Access but is shaping up to be pretty fun. It's like a cross between Runescape and Skyrim with other aspects adding some originality. I'm excited for future updates.

This game surprised me in more ways than I can ever explain. I never felt more rewarded for exploration, even tho the game clearly is not finished I somehow could feel the entire experience the developers were trying to pass on. The combat is amazing, the quests amazing, the tools given to you were incredibly fun. I will keep my eye on this one cause I'm sure that when it's done it will be a VERY special RPG.

awesome game. has a ways to go with adding 'content' but the basic combat, traversal, and exploration are a lot of fun and the amount of different skills is neat as well. also one of the best magic systems ive ever seen in a real time game.

it definitely leads into the 'rule of cool' and letting you do things that you want. i picked necromancer early and at level 3 or 4 i could summon 20 skeletons to run around with me and wreck shit, but the combat magic was great too. the game is very good at not limiting you

definitely needs some more time in the oven but im excited for what this will turn into

I have to say this game is a little buggy and has a ways to go to feel like a complete game.. that being said for the state this game is in it is absolutely amazing. It literally has a bit of everything; you want to mine and craft weapons you can. you want to craft potions go for it. you want to hunt down weapons that have cool special moves you got it. you want to do a quest for an ancient dragon, hatch its egg and have a dragon of your own to fly around, this game has it. the possibility in this game seems endless! there is to much this game has to offer to explain before bed but this is by far one of my favorite titles in the past few year I highly recommend if you are a fan of elder scrolls. I hope the devs keep up the good work and keep adding content. 9.5/10

This has been on my wishlist for a while and I finally decided to give it a go. The steam page doesn't do it justice, there is a simple story which fits the sandbox feel, great mechanics that vary a lot and the world is fun to explore and interact with. I never thought I'd enjoy collecting resources as much as I do in this game, it's oddly addictive.

I thought the over world map would not be my thing but I think the events that pop up make it fun to explore. The graphics don't matter at all which is weird for me to say because I'm a bit of stickler for high res and whatnot but this just feels right. Honestly very impressive and I cannot wait to see what comes next because there is already a lot of fun to be had here!

Where to start, where to start... From first impressions my single word descriptor for this game would be: Ambitious.

There is really a wide spread of varied gameplay loops to immerse yourself in, from crafting, to custom potion brewing, to village development, smithing, fishing, cooking, the list goes on...

There's also already an extensive library of skills, spells and abilities to play around with and find interesting combinations. Basically- the framework of this game is extensive and I very much expect it to grow into it's shoes.

Now, currently, while the content provided is spread over many areas, it is in need of more depth. If, however, you'd enjoy watching an interesting game develop over time I'd highly recommend picking it up.

In terms of whether or not it's worth your money, I'd say within the first 3 hours of gameplay I would be satisfied paying about half the asking price (Which I did purchase at 50% off). Now at around 6 almost 7 hours in I would say it's just about broke even at 20$. And if this game ever features multiplayer co-op? It'd quite literally be a no-brainer insta-purchase.

Overall in it's current state, bugs and all, I'd say it's a solid 6.5/10 with room to improve over time. Worth the money, and worth watching to see where it goes.

First, the game is great, the concept is great, and the execution is great. Second, right now performance is not that great. I want to support the devs but I am poor and a penny pincher, so I refunded. I will purchase it again after they have had more time to cook.

I have been following this game on Tik Tok for a while now, and it has not disappointed! It has come a long way, and it still has quite a ways to go, and I can't wait to see what comes next. The wide variety of weapons, spells, and abilities, mixed with some Elder Scrolls combat and Runescape leveling make for one hell of an addicting game.

Very nice game with easy progression and gameplay!
So easy to play and have fun with.
Just create a character and do whatever you want .

This game is pretty awesome

Combat is incredibly fun. Like stupidly fun. You can mix and match everything, and this isn't some stat stick-attribute-only sort of progression. Upgrades and progression are a mix of stats and new skills / modifiers or proficiency alterations.

For example, even the shield has an ability you unlock later that lets you use it like a kite to glide, and a spectral shield throw that creates a platform for climbing purposes.

There are tonnnnnns of interactions and skills that have very meaningful upgrades. The I think one of the unarmed proficiency upgrades (not even a skill itself) allows you to hold down a button to throw an enemy after a combo or something?)

You can shapeshift, use quite a few types of magic (Nercomancy is the one I have most exp with and it feels awesome. Does a great job of matching the aesthetic you would expect.) You can use guns, bows and crossbows, large 2 handed weapons, daggers, staves, wands and unarmed combat has its own entire progression system that feels very beat-em-up.

The combat encourages the use of 3 dimensions as well. You start off with a grappling hook but there are a bunch of skills that, well, literally let you fly as a bird or do a bunch of ninja dashes / teleports. Some enemies are flying and require either the use of cover as you approach or jumping off trees to catch. Since there are no hard locks on skills and you're encouraged to respec, whos to say you cant be a rogue that can use some magic homing skills?

Apart from the very briefly touched on combat~
List of things you can also do:
Minigames for gathering resources and crafting such as Fishing, Blacksmithing, Townbuilding, cooking, Tree chopping, Mining, forging, magic book learning(Literally a whole cipher for a separate character alphabet that has time based bonuses for exp that lets you learn new magic from your own quarters or camp lol.)

You develop proficiency for things by doing the relative actions. Want to run away from bad guys on the mount and warband style world map? I hope youve sprinted quite a lot because if you have you will have a higher chance of evading. There are bonuses to speed, jumping, and basically everything you do.

The gameplay loop of the game is traveling and exploring on the worldmap, navigating and choosing / evading dynamically generated events, and questing / taming / boss hunting / story events and even a calender that informs the player of incoming events based on the time of the month. (You may have a boss battle a week out and can travel there or prep accordingly)

TBH Im no where near the lategame or anything and the accuracy may be slightly off from my review but this game is made by one person, and as someone who's used unity and programmed for a good 2 years, it's incredible how much was accomplished.

There are frequent updates and a very active community discord with thousands of people.

Im just really surprised honestly. I wasnt expecting much but then I kept discovering new systems and combinations for how I could approach the game. Im just really happy I found a game that combines Mount and blade warband, conan exiles, and Skyrim all in one. Super cool concept, huge ambition and great early access results so far.

Keep it up dev!

I have only played for about 2 and a half hour, but I have to say this is one of the most fun games I have played in a while

The exploring is quite fun, I loved the small mini games that I have to do whenever I have to mine or to make a weapon, and most of all I really love the combat in this game, It's not just attack and block, it's more than that. I have done quite some creative ways to attack a goblin with a spear and that's the only weapon I have used currently, I wonder how many more creative ways I can kill an enemy with other types of weapons.

Some people in the reviews are mentioning that some quests have bugs in them, I haven't experienced any bugs yet but there are chances that it will happen eventually but I am fine with that as long as it doesn't happen too often. I have also seen that some areas in this game gives a bit poor performance and frame drops sometimes, and my computer heats up a bit more while playing this game so I kinda hope the developers manage to fix that a bit by optimizing some of the areas in the game a little more to prevent frame drops and PC heating up. (It's still very playable for me but more optimization is still needed)

I have a few suggestions about things that I would like to have in game (I am not sure if some of them are already in the game since I have only played for 2 hours or if the devs have already planned it for the future, so sorry in advance).

- It would be nice to have some sort of daily quests where each day there would be a different type of quests to do, maybe mining certain ores or defeating certain amount of enemies and stuff like that, or some NPCs which have endless amount of quests like those (like I said, I only have played for about 2 hours I am not sure if there's already NPC's with endless amount of quests or not)

- I would love to have sliding as a movement in this game, just sprint and slide, it will make the combat even more satisfying and sliding down hills would be fun too, maybe there can be some upgrades for sliding as well like uhh leave a fire trail behind while sliding for a bit or something like that. I would love if there are more stuff added for the combat and movements like that, maybe even able to front or backflip while in the air and if you manage to hit a trickshot then you get extra XP for style... actually on second thought I think the backflip thing might be too much, but uhh yeah sliding would be great.

- Some more enemy types, I saw a goblin with a gun and a jet pack and I was like "Holy shit". I would love to have more unique enemies like that, maybe like some mad wizard which confuses you and inverts your controls so you have trouble moving for a bit or some enemies who are healers and go ahead and heal others so you have to kill the healers first.

- More settings for difficulties, for enemies and even the mini games. If you fail to mine an ore perfectly, your pickaxe would explode and you will die or something like that, that would be funny, but that's up to the devs.


To summarize all this: The game is great, the combat & movement is satisfying (I would really love more movement, combats and difficulty settings added in the future updates, sliding pls) The game needs a bit more optimization to prevent frame drops and PC heating. ALSO ONE OF THE SOUNDTRACKS IS VERY PEACEFUL. Seriously this is amazing. This game truly has potential, I really love these types of games.

I do find the game fun and I see the potential of it in the future. But I have a massive issue with the coupling of fps and sensitivity, meaning during fps drops the sensitivity increases dramatically. I searched on their discord regarding this issue and see that it's been mentioned multiple time dating back to October 2023 but not fixed :(

Great game so far with a lot of awesome ideas and features, particularly a visceral combat and magic system that had me spending hours on end just plugging and pulling skill points here and there and farming random encounters to test how wickedly each skill let me massacre goblins. There's still a lot of work in progress things and the game overall is gonna need a massive coat of polish at some point before release, but what's there so far should be solid bones for the rest. I was honestly impressed with the main quests implemented, makes me watch this game and its dev career with great interest.