Buy Blood 2

If Blood II's screen flickers between the game and an empty window during gameplay, here are a couple of things to try:

1. Turn off any programs in the System Tray with animated icons (e.g. Process Explorer, Speedfan).

2. In the Blood II Launcher, go to Advanced Options, type "+maxfps 60" (without quotes) into the Command-Line field, and check "Always specify these command-line parameters"

Well, I played this game, as I was young and I loved it.
It gave me scary nights and fear moments. I still own the original CD but I never could make it run proper on Win 7.
So I´m real happy that you can buy it now from steam and it run good on win 7 but only in 1024 x 768 like that.
Highly recommended. To bad that is not remastered in HD.

Update : I play the game now with the "extra grisby mod" and this is a lot of improvement in sound, graphic & bug fixes just check this out.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/blood-2-the-chosen-extra-crispy

http://www.moddb.com/mods/blood-2-the-chosen-extra-crispy

It helps

Blood 2 is a decent game in itself. It follows the story of Caleb on the main story. Gideon rises and tries to take over the world and kill Caleb while he is finding a way to ressurect his friends called the Chosen, decent story. But on most machines on Windows 8 the game performs horribly! But there is a widescreen fix, but I recommend turning the settings down alot to get a playable experince. Overall I say get it if you can stand bugs and glitches and performance issues. One Unit Whole Blood is a much better deal though.

I could go on about all the things wrong with this game because there is a lot but since I enjoy this game so much I'd rather just share what I like about it. There are a LOT of guns, usually you can dual weild them too! It's fun to shoot stuff, the animations are great, overall the graphics and 3d models are great. I love the voice acting and humor. Most of the levels are well done and look fantastic. Straight forward linear no BS gameplay, just run n gun and shoot the hell out of ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. Definitely no Half-Life or Duke 3D or Doom, but definitely fun. P.S. I used to hate this game too.

It's howdy-doodie time, kiddies. The bad man is here.

A classic sequence. It is a bit bugged (you have to use compatibility mode), but if you are a fan like me, it's not going to stop you.

Having never played Blood II until now, I can tell that for the time this was a pretty fun game. Like the original Blood, you control Caleb (one of my favorite video game protagonists) as he fights off zombies, demons and the like, all while spouting out cheesy one-liners and using some crazy weapons along the way. Oh, and there's lots of blood in the game as well, but you probably already knew that.

The second Blood game is also awesome not as awesome as the first but a jump up in graphics still loads of blood and gore and those great sayings i would recconmend this game and its not bad in price for what you get. ;)

Extremely awesome game that just takes me back. However be aware, if you are using Win 8/8.1, it will not run well. I've tried absolutely everything and the only way it runs half way decent is if you use Lithtech's software renderer which makes everything look aweful and unplayable. Switched over to run it on my win 7 and win xp machines and it works smoooooth.

Good memories and a freakin solid shooter with crazy fun weapons and hilarious B-movie dialogue... Groovy!

Blood 2 and the Nightmares Expansion are decent enough to play. It's a classic late 90's shooter (with the no reloading thing and the endless copy paste enemies). All the ideas in this game are cool, it even has some easter eggs.. not many of them are funny but it's a bunch of cool references. Caleb himself is an anti-hero, You could compare him to Alucard From Hellsing, Not caring for common people and is just wants Blood and Vengence. (Personally the repressed, evil insanity thing really appeals to me, even if it's a Protagonist or 'The Good Guy').
The ending left room for a Sequel.. as in the Developers would have had the option to if they wanted, It'd be totally okay if they just left things as they are.
..Oh Yeah, don't complain about the game's realism.. I've read some of the other reviews on here, "Everything Explodes, even the trash bags!!" It's a 90's game dude.. Quake 2 was very similar in that way, shoot a dead body with a pistol and it explodes.

*Sigh* This game is basically my childhood, I found it when i was 7 in my Mother's computer game rack, and had a blast (lost the CD as the irresponsible child I was).
As I've played through on this steam release, the game has ended with a crash, within 20 minutes, 3 times.
I bought the game KNOWING FULL WELL that on steam it has this issue (others having the screen flicker problem).
I bought this game along with the previous Blood game to support them, as dumb as that sounds, I had the slight hope that they might update the game with at least a small patch, I know that Jace Hall tried to get the first game with HD, re-released for Free, but the ones who own the rights to the franchise were having financial issues, I don't think they were keen on giving away an asset, even though jace would have paid for the HD re-release himself.
I hope I at lease supported this game a little.. Even though it was only $4.99.

While not as good as the 1st, its still a decent fps.

First of all:

If you get the MFC crash. Run the game in windows 98 compatibility mode and as administrator (found this info on GOG).

OKAY, OKAY I ADMIT IT, I'M BIASED AGAINST THIS GAME. BUT YOU MIGHT ACTUALLY LIKE IT. MAYBE JUST SKIP MY REVIEW AND JUST WATCH SOME GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE lol.
http://youtu.be/o3z0spt1RFI
I played this a game quite a bit years ago i.e. when it first came in 1998. I actually started off with the demo. Yes I did play it today and it still the same I've clocked multiple times so I know the game well. The game is okay but nothing special, it disappointing unfortunately.

Okay yes it is sequel to Blood. However I really don't think the game is as good. I think that because of the standard of 3D games at the time i.e. low poly models that sort of thing, making the transition to 3D didn't really benefit the blood series of games. In fact if you don't count 'Nightmare levels' expansion for this. This was the last blood game. And personally I think it that's they tried to do it in 3D to early on. The first game in 2D actually looks better than this. Just compare the first level of game to each. The first Blood had Caleb rising from the grave in a cool mortuary and traversing through a funeral parlour. Blood II has you walking down the carriages of a train. It cannot get more corridor like and linear, and that level only goes for about one minute if you just run down it. Yes the textures in the first game are pixelly but you actually see the detail such as text clearly. In blood II textures look like a painting whose colours have run because the canvas was soaked in water; everything is a blurred smear. The models in Blood II look so much worse than the 2D sprites in the original game. Compare the Tchernobog 3D model in Blood II you find in the museum to the 2D version you find at the end of Blood. The sprites had so much more detail in them including their animations. I mean blow an enemy up in Blood and you witness them being torn asunder in an animation formed by a series of sprites. But blood II they will just be replaced by the crappy low poly gibs and blurry blood spatters. The first Blood game has so much more detail; finer detail. Environments in that game looked like they had a lot of effort into them. Maybe it in Blood 2 it is not so much that effort wasn't put into the game, more that PCs that people had at the time weren't that powerful so higher detailed 3D models and detailed levels weren't really feasible yet let alone the standard.

Even the one liners from Caleb and other player characters are not the same. Yes it sound like Caleb. I think it is actually a different voice actor maybe. But the lines are less black humour and more just sadistic.

Anyway it's not all bad. Some of the gun play is actually satisfying, then again some is pretty lame and it's hard to control fine control your character movement. Years ago, not now lol I played the demo over and over again. Using the assault rifle felt pretty good. I'm recommending that people can enjoy this but it's just an inferior substitute for the original game which is also now available on steam. If you have to choose between them play that instead.

Click here for more let’s play videos =)

Developers please fix the bugs though! No issues with video at all but at certain points while playing the game will just crash for no reason, would love to finish this game, but with the bugs its almost impossible and can you set it so config file is saved locally? Everytime a crash occurs i have to reset my key configs, other than that, great game, played it back in the 90's and never got to finish it, really hoping these minor issues can get fixed/patched.

Blood II: The Chosen was one of my favorite FPSes.
No, it wasn't that groundbreaking on release, but It offered decent graphics, relly AWESOME music, that from time to time I like to listen to - and most importantly - the dark atmosphere.
You knew that bad things were lurking behind the corner. The scary thing.
And the thing that made you feel better was the fact, you were far meaner and badder than anything else on the planet :)
Great voice acting, great music, great level design, same for weapons...
I am willing to overlook the bugs for those things.
Not to mention this game is old school - if you don't try hard, you will get pwnd. Now, that is so rare today...
I try to run this game for a while from time to time, but be warned it doesn't like high resolutions. Tends to crash, so no HD, despite the visible option.

If you are running Windows Vista or later ... dont buy this ! Really !
Its a really great game but it cant handle modern Graphic Cards or Display Resolutions.
The game keeps crashing every few minutes.

I like my hands bloody...

It is hard to tell whether Blood II is good or bad at all. It is a little of both, with respect to the time it was created. It would not be fair to compare it to current games, of course, but even in comparison to games of the same era it stands back a little. There is no other game I can remember where the opponents are that stupid. One can hardly call that "AI". Even a Pacman ghost has more AI than the Cabalco zombies. Rendered cutscenes are embarrassing at best, and the storyline is more than questionable. On the other hand, the game features nice graphics and effects, and has some funny moments. Somehow, once in a while, playing it again is actually quite fun. But eventually I "grew" up with that game and it brings back memories. That is the only reason to replay at all.
I certainly would not recommend the game to anyone who isn't already familiar with the Blood gameset. And now for the main reason why I cannot recommend the game at all: it is technically close to unusable.
Blood II used to become unstable even back in the old days if you owned a PC "too powerful". Apparently the developers have put their engine timing a little on the cheap side, and nothing has been changed about this at all to make it more compatible to current platforms. Actually you will buy the same binaries that were on the original game CD back in 1998! The Steam client does not even have to be running so the binaries obviously literally weren't changed a bit. And you better don't use the Steam client to launch the game at all becuase it is usually not running in an Admin context, so it will not apply compatibility mode which is a mere joke... the game will crash almost instantly.
While on some machines (including mine) there is still a chance to get it working (e.g. by setting the compatibility mode to XP SP3 and running the game as Administrator directly from the installation folder), you should anticipate at least one crash in 10 minutes of gameplay at random times, so remember to save frequently... very frequently.

So this is a really bad strategy for remarketing. I would expect a software provider to do what is necessary to restore compatibility to current hardware before a game goes for sale. If I had known in advance, I could just have used the Blood II CD that I already owned (purchased 1999!).
Steam did a nice job getting Duke3D running thanks to excellent DosBox integration. The Blood I package is already a bit screwed up because no link is created to run the setup.exe you need to map keys, set video resolution etc... if you are not familiar with DosBox, you won't get very happy. Seems to me they are just squeezing some dollars out of reminiscent fools like me without actually caring much about the quality delivered. Too bad. So the best experience for these old games is running them on the machine they were built for, if you still have one that works.

A decade ago, I did enjoy this game (despite the bugs present even back then - namely with collision detection); move forward to today and it seems one bug has been swapped for another. The most galling bug is random termination - go forward, blast away a couple of NPCs, round the next corner and boom! back to the desktop without any explaination whatsoever.

Granted this game hasn't been ported towards more recent platforms (not that XP is "recent" by any measure of the term) but even trying to launch with any compatibility options enabled results in an unlaunchable game. To recap: random program quits when playing without compatibility, and unable to get beyond the launcher if playing with compatibility enabled.

If lith (and/or successors) can fix at least this bug I'll reconsider this review, but that's a fairly big "if" at this point.

Can't even start/play the game on Win7 :(