Blood Strike

I read an article about Chinese copies and the multi-billion dollar industry of plagiarising and creating cheap replicas of everything from sneakers to cars, and it has kind of stuck with me. It refuses to leave my mind. Because it showed two identical shoe factories ten metres apart on the same land, with the same equipment, machinery, materials and number of workers. One made Adidas Yeezys, while the other made identical copies based on the same moulds, shapes, machines and production methods. One shoe (the 'original') sold for £200 per pair while the seemingly exact same shoe (made ten metres to the west in an identical factory) sold for £20.

Of course, this applies to almost everything. Whatever you might want to buy, you can always surf Temu, Ebay, Wish or Alibaba to buy Chinese copies at a much lower price. This also applies to the newly released mobile title Blood Strike (which should not be confused with the PC game Blood Strike from Quozhou), which is such a shameless Call of Duty: Warzone copy that it becomes downright laughable at times. However, as with the Yeezy copies, this does not mean that the product is inherently bad, or even worse than the original... But it's painfully obvious that NetEase never intended to create anything of its own here. There is exactly zero originality in Blood Strike. Zero.

The layout and look is ripped straight out of Call of Duty: Warzone. You jump out of an aeroplane over a gigantic map littered with military barracks, small houses, underground passages and battlefields. You're up against 99 other players and, like all battle royale titles, it's all about shooting down your opponents, surviving and moving towards the centre of the circle as it shrinks. The map looks and feels very much like Verdansk. The menus and loadout system feel exactly like Warzone (1), the skins (operators) are as if they were ripped directly from Warzone 2.0 and the loot boxes on the ground are ripped directly from Warzone. This also applies to the feel of the game and how Netease has structured the different systems and functions.

You can carry two weapons at the same time and, just like in Warzone, it's best to combine an LMG or a sniper with a SMG with a high rate of fire and small bullets. The only thing that really separates these games is that in Blood Strike you use medicine boxes instead of bulletproof plates that in Activision's original you press into your bulletproof vest to restore your health. As usual with this type of FPS, the touch control portion of Blood Strike is messy, at best. The screen is covered with various buttons (which is required given how intricate the game systems in these battle royale titles really are these days) and for my part, it's almost impossible to dot the right symbol without rubbing your finger on another, and this has led me to test Blood Strike with my Backbone. I'd say that's as big a requirement here as in Warzone Mobile, PUBG Mobile and the mini version of Fortnite.

Creating a battle royale for Android and iPhone and building graphics that flow nicely to all possible mobile models when 100 players have to compete on the same map cannot be easy. That's also why the newly released Warzone Mobile looks like a 15 year old game, because Activision of course had to trim away and trim away most of the graphics from the console version, and still has performance problems right now. Blood Strike is better optimised than Warzone Mobile without being uglier. The polygon models are simple but acceptable while the textures feel old and low-resolution just like the lighting. It's just not very good looking and I, playing on an Iphone 14 Pro Max, have probably 40-50 different action games installed that look much better than this does. But it flows nicely... It should definitely be said and NetEase should be commended for that.

Basically, there is not much in Blood Strike that is bad. The presentation breathes Call of Duty just like the design, the game mechanics and the map itself, but it also means that most of it feels familiar and there's something liberating in pure copies like this, by developers who don't hide the fact that they just carbon-copied a competitor. The firefights themselves become a bit static, though, and the atmosphere of the matches is never as dramatic as in Warzone Mobile, which is the better game here. That said, Blood Strike is a decent battle royale that's good enough to kill a few hours here and there.