For those of you who cannot claim familiarity with Blood’s many qualities in your memory, allow me to give you the elevator pitch – it’s Duke Nukem 3D by way of the Evil Dead, Stephen King and with more than a dash of Eldritch grotesqueness to boot. So yeah, just on the face of that alone, Blood slaps and nearly three decades later, I’m happy to say that the slapping hasn’t stopped.
It hasn’t been even a month since those remastering savants over at Nightdive Studios gave us Outlaws + A Handful of Missions, a sterling and loving remaster of an oft-forgotten PC first-person shooter. So it is then that Nightdive Studios’ seeming infatuation with polishing up the diamonds in the rough from gaming’s yesteryear continues unabated with Blood: Refreshed Supply and boy oh boy, am I glad it does because Blood: Refreshed Supply has a *lot* to offer the FPS genre in 2025 to say the least.
Blood: Refreshed Supply PS5 Review
Using 3D Realms legendary Duke Nukem 3D as a conceptual touchstone then, Blood: Refreshed Supply is near-identical, structurally speaking at least. This means that you’ll be stabbing, shooting and blowing the claret covered stuffing out of anything that moves as you seek out keys to unlock new areas, leverage all manner of fancy gadgets and sniff out loot-stuffed secret hidey-holes as you push onto reaching the exit before moving onto the next level and doing the same thing again. Now while that description sounds perhaps a little reductive when reading it back to myself after putting pen to paper (well, fingers to keyboard anyway), it’s certainly worth noting that much like Duke Nukem 3D before it, the devil is in the details when it comes to Blood: Refreshed Supply. Quite literally, in fact.
The guiding star of Blood: Refreshed Supply is arguably its hugely enjoyable and compelling setting. Whole galaxies away from the dudebro coded, alien invasion backdrop to which Duke Nukem 3D’s epic ballet of alien face-blasting unfolds, Blood: Refreshed Supply elects to go, somewhat furiously, in the opposite direction. Whereas Duke Nukem’s motormouth hero falls from the skies as his high tech flying mobile/ship/thing blazes into the distance, Blood’s main protagonist instead finds his own broken form rising from the earth (from his gwaaaave, if you will), to wreak freewheeling havoc on those that have wronged him.
Blood, you see, weaves an old fashioned tale of revenge as our playable protag, Caleb, finds himself unceremoniously murdered by a cult hellbent on bringing a terrible evil into the world, all the while the love of his life has been kidnapped because bad dudes gonna bad dude. Resurrected as an eternally, incandescently furious undead gunslinger, Caleb subsequently arises from the site of his earthly ruin and begins his vengeful quest of cult murder and redemption in earnest. First off, before you do *anything*, you’ll want to disable the gyro motion controls immediately and set jump to ‘X’ before you lose your mind. Trust me, seriously. Now with that order of business out of the way, you’ll get stuck into Blood: Refreshed Supply and boy does this 28 year old offering make quite the first impression.
After literally rising from your grave in a fashion that would delight Altered Beast fans, you’ll soon gain access to the first firearm that Blood offers up and boy oh boy are you not ready for it. Put simply, Blood has the most horrific starting basic firearm ever seen in an FPS, namely, the flare gun. Rather than just providing players with a standard pistol, the flare gun is a single shot deal which is Extremely Violent. How violent? Well, it’s extremely violent in that you can shoot someone with a flare gun and then witness them immolate just a second later while they run around screaming and cursing “it burns! It burns!” before melting into a shrieking, exploding pile of slippery gristle and gore.
As such this hugely satisfying hyperviolent spectacle dutifully sets out Blood’s stall from a tonal perspective, reinforcing the fact that this is a dark and highly violent occult FPS which for the time when it released back in 1997, was something that was utterly unheard of. In 2025, the setting still feels compelling not least because while Blood is horrendously violent with all manner of exploding corpses, beheaded zombies, decimated bodies and more, it also has its tongue planted firmly in cheek on a number of occasions as well.
For a start, the end of level summary screen doesn’t have any fancy music – in fact it doesn’t have any music at all. Instead, it just has a cacophony of overlapping screams and blood-curdling cries and that’s pretty much it. Nice. Elsewhere, pop culture references abound pretty generously. Whether it’s the Evil Dead, Stephen King’s IT or even The Shining (there’s a whole level called the ‘Overlooked Hotel’ which is loosely modelled after the iconic stopover from Kubrick’s movie in places), it’s clear that despite is seemingly grim dark veneer and relentless ultraviolence that Blood doesn’t take itself too seriously overall – a fact that is further borne out by the fact that much like Duke Nukem, Caleb also has a raft of timely quips of his own to boot.
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On a mechanical level, Blood also satisfies in ways which prove that its particular brand of gloop-gore, cultist face shooting action is as compelling now as it was all those years ago. Starting with the enemies, they’re a hugely varied bunch to say the least, that are as different from one another as they are enjoyable to put in the ground. From deranged, smack talking cultists (who scream hilariously when they get blown up by dynamite), to bloated acid spitting zombies, undead axe murderers, flying demons and even Evil Dead style disembodied hands that can literally throttle you to death, Blood’s cast of baddies all feel appropriately different from one another and threatening in their own way.
It’s also certainly worth noting too that the enemies which infest Blood’s 42 entirely different levels aren’t pushovers either. Though some can be dispatched quite quickly, just about all of the bad dudes in Blood can rapidly dish out a lot of damage even on the lower difficulty levels and are not only very accurate with firearms but can also creep up on you from secret doors which open up as you move past them. Unluckily for them but luckily for you, Blood provides an absolute arsenal of mortal coil separating weaponry that runs the gamut from the traditional to the fantastically oddball. In addition to the aforementioned thoroughly excellent flare gun, Caleb will get his hands on sawn-off shotguns, tommy guns, sticks of dynamite, a neat aerosol and lighter combo which becomes a devastating improvised flamethrower and a creepy voodoo doll to name just a few.
And then there are the levels which in a package of already fairly heady FPS shenanigans puts something of a rotten cherry atop the whole pile of carnage. Much more than just a bunch of levels sitting next to each other on a menu, Blood’s levels all follow on from one another. After you stop a runaway train for instance, it crashes into an area at which the next level starts. In another example, you begin on a boat sailing through some distinctly blocky icebergs, before busting a hole in the side of one of the icebergs and descending to the secret cultist facility hidden within. It’s all superbly varied stuff which really helps to elevate Blood above and beyond the immediate vicinity of its genre peers.
Each of these levels are not only brilliantly designed, but beautifully varied too. In fact, one particular highlight is a circus level that has you kicking decapitated heads into a machine operated monster mouth in a carnival, unlocking limited invincibility in the process. Like Duke Nukem 3D before it, another 90s shooter that uses the same Build engine which powers Blood, there’s a whole lot of environmental destruction with specific walls getting blown out leading to secret areas. It’s just hugely imaginative stuff that I wish more shooters would take inspiration from.
Of course this being a Nightdive Studios joint, Blood: Refreshed Supply gets a whole lotta love for its release to contemporary audiences. Not only do you get a butt-ton of behind the scenes and extra supplementary material, but you also nab two extra campaigns (the second of which, Death Wish, is due post release), local multiplayer modes, high definition cut scenes, classic and remastered sound mixes to choose from and the sort of deliciously smooth 4K, 120 FPS presentation we’ve come to expect from arguably one of the best remaster houses on the planet.
Nightdive Studios has done once it again with Blood: Refreshed Supply. Not only has the developer lavished its typically heady amount of polish and care on Blood: Refreshed Supply, but so too does it deserve a whole heap of credit for refreshing (pun intended), one of the best shooters of the 1990s for contemporary consoles. Boasting some incredible level design, massively satisfying weapons and a wealth of additional content, Blood: Refreshed Supply deftly mimics its resurrected protagonist by still holding up so darn well all these years later.
https://youtu.be/-T3-BGu6QYo
Blood: Refreshed Supply is out now on PS4 and PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.