Parents' Guide to Werewolf: The Apocalypse -- Earthblood

Instead of keeping you on the edge of your seat with fast-paced supernatural play, the action in this game quickly becomes stale, repetitive, and disjointed. Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood starts off on a bad note by looking very stale and outdated. Character models during story cutscenes look stiff, especially when contrasted to the smoother morphing of Cahal from human to wolf form. This could possibly be overlooked if the gameplay was varied or intriguing. But most of the time, you sneak around from room to room, eliminating guards that don't even roam areas in search patterns, or you bypass them entirely without fighting. You can also dive headfirst into battle, but as a werewolf, you're considerably more powerful than virtually every enemy you face, even with overwhelming numbers. It's only closer towards the end of the game, when otherworldly creatures start to appear, that you face a real challenge, but even then, it's hard to not wade through your targets and come out fine.

It's also too easy for Cahal to dive into Frenzy attacks to eliminate foes by earning rage, which feels completely disjointed from the story. Plotwise, Cahal's frenzy caused his self-exile. But in play, it's possible to Frenzy multiple times by hitting enemies in combat or drinking from a flask, reducing this key plot point to just meaningless ultimate strikes. That helps to jettison the limited lore that's included in the game about werewolves, their tribes, and their connection to the spiritual world as well as Gaia in favor of a meandering plot that never fully delivers a satisfying conclusion. It also makes Cahal unsympathetic, and considering that you're facing monstrous people and actual monsters, that doesn't endear him to players. The end result is that Earthblood feels like a story that's unfinished, unpolished, and unsatisfying.