Summary
A long-lost action-adventure game from the early 2000s -Captain Blood- finally made its way to modern platforms on May 6 after being stuck in development purgatory for over a decade and then abandoned. Being such an old game,Captain Bloodexpectedly has its quirks and oddities, but publisher SNEG has defended them as integral tenets of its very charm.
Work onCaptain Bloodfirst began in 2003 by Akella, the developer behind thePirates of the Caribbeangameof that era.Captain Bloodwas meant to be a gritty,God of War-inspired hack-and-slash game set to release in 2006 for the OG Xbox and PC, but was later shifted to the Xbox 360. Unfortunately,Captain Bloodpublisher Playlogic declared bankruptcy in 2010, leaving the game’s development stalled and eventually canceled. Now,Captain Bloodhas been completed and released by SNEG, a publisher dedicated to game preservation.
Captain Bloodwas resurrectedwith help from its original developers - now working under the name Seawolf Studio - and aims to present the game exactly as it would have appeared had it launched in the late 2000s. Aside from bug fixes and necessary tweaks for compatibility,Captain Bloodhas been left untouched. Therefore, it doesn’t quite carry the same level of polish as most modern games, andCaptain Blood’s Metacritic review scores reflect this, with a 57 on PS5 and 45 on PC. However, SNEG co-founder Oleg Klapovskiy says that’s not a bad thing. Speaking toPCGamer in a recent interview, Klapovskiy said, “If you assess the game by modern standards, I think I would put it at a very low score. I would say, three? Four?”
Captain Blood Publisher SNEG Believes it’s a 7.5/10 Game by 2010 Standards
He then stressed thatCaptain Bloodis “not a game from 2025,” so it shouldn’t be judged along those lines. “It has all its charm, all its flaws, and all the vibes are from that era. If you assess it as a game from that time, I would assess it as a 7.5/10 game,” stated Klapovskiy.Captain Bloodclearly wears its age proudly and embraces the jank and bombast of its time, and players seem to appreciate it as well, with68 Very Positive reviews on the game’s Steam pageat the time of writing. It also joins thedwindling list of pirate-themed gamesthese days, which fans of the sub-genre will likely be happy about.
Captain Bloodis one of the more curious and encouraging releases in recent memory. SNEG and Seawolf Studio didn’t finish the game to make money or chase trends, but because it deserved to be finished. SNEG’s co-founders - both former GOG staff - saw it as an act of preservation and a duty to the devs who carried the memory of a project that never saw the light of day for over two decades. Some of them, now working onmajor games likeRoblox, even contributed in their free time just to seeCaptain Bloodcompleted and in players' hands.
