Blood Purge: Releaseburg Early Alpha Preview

I was invited to try out Blood Purge: Releaseburg's early alpha, which consists of the first 15 levels and shows the main gameplay loop. Developed and published by SteadyBoar, this title has you embarking on a journey across an unknown city, where portals are opening and bringing zombies from another dimension into yours.

It's an action roguelike where you'll be tasked with timing your shots, manoeuvring the environment and the unique attacks from the zombies that spawn throughout. Rather than a wave-based game or an endless survival, you'll instead have to fight a certain number of zombies per stage before you're allowed to progress to the next one, though taking too long can prompt the next wave of zombies from spawning, even before you've managed to clean them all out.

In total, so far, there are about five different types of zombies that I got to fight against. These have the usual spread of skills you might be accustomed to, with the regular walkers, runners, long-range spitter-like foes, some that throw some sort of projectile to you from above at long intervals, and finally, the hulking brute (and their shield, in the later stages).Blood Purge: Releaseburg amps up the difficulty over the stages by introducing stronger variants or more of them at any given time (like the panic-filling three-brute stage I had to pass to finish the demo).

Each run gives you the opportunity to find new weapons every few stages, and you'll be able to choose from a couple of perks. The roguelite aspect gives you the capability to gather coins in order to unlock more perk slots or choices of perks per completed level, letting you have better builds the deeper into the game you go. However, these coins felt scarce, with some upgrades costing over 100 coins and each level giving you a measly single coin (unless you get the perk that increases how many you get, which, after being fully upgraded, gives you five coins per stage).

It isn't too much of a bother, as the gameplay loop is long, and if it hadn't taken me only about an hour to complete the demo sent to me (consisting of essentially two rounds), I would have unlocked more of the permanent perks. It helps that the gameplay loop feels exciting, even when you don't have a favourable build going, and you'll be battling several systems at once (some intentionally and some due to relatively poor design choices).

Managing ammo on your gun, the limited ammo on your special guns, and their individual timings feel great. Though it's certainly accessible, there are definitely moments when it feels like skill will really be able to shine through via management of the ammo and proper use of perfectly timing your shot. Using the environment to deal with clusters of enemies was also gratifying, as it made it fun to look around the environment and see what explosive barrels would trigger which chains and kill which foes, giving you the incentive to keep an eye everywhere and shoot enemies to force them within the explosive confine.

That said, though, there are some poor design choices I wasn't a massive fan of, namely, the controls. To lock onto a target, you'll need to right-click (which felt surprisingly comfortable), shoot by holding the left mouse button, until you release at the right time (lest you miss), and move with WASD. That's about all of the intuitive controls, though, as you'll need to switch weapons with Left Shift (which, when checking which of my weapons had enough ammo, I triggered sticky keys about three times mid-fight), you reload with the space bar, and you dodge with F. Aside from constantly triggering my sticky keys, dodging to the right was impossible due to the use of F as the dodge roll.

When playing the game, my resolution was stuck at full-screen super ultrawide, which I was thankful that Blood Purge: Releaseburg is fully ultrawide compatible straight after downloading, but I wasn't a fan of the limited display options. If you want to play at a smaller resolution, you won't be able to, and with your ammo being on the top right and your health on the top left, my neck was craning a bit too much for a title that demanded such precise management of my limited resources.

Finally, there are some assets that feel temporary and ill-polished. The health bar and ammo display felt a bit copy-paste from one another, and I felt specifically that the ammo was a bit strange as a drainable bar resource rather than a visual of bullets (after all, the bar is unnecessary since the game tells you how much ammo you have willingly). Meanwhile, the voice-acting of the character felt a bit metal and ‘90s, which isn't really a complaint.

These are all minor niggles, though, as they are things that SteadyBoar could easily solve with a single patch. Otherwise, you have a pretty good title with comic-esque visuals and fast-paced gameplay; it looks and plays nice, and when it comes to a game, that's all I really care about.

Honestly, Blood Purge: Releaseburg went from being entirely off my radar to an exciting upcoming release. It has potential, with the fast-paced gameplay and minor management systems keeping me engaged throughout my short gameplay experience.

Blood Purge: Releaseburg comes out sometime in Q4 2024.