Illbleed Hands-On

Illbleed is an ambitious new entry into the survival horror genre, but can it stand up to the competition? The game pits you against a haunted house rife with gory surprises and crawling with freakish creatures. The game displays 6 sense meters to monitor the environment (the sixth of course being "sixth sense". This supposedly alerts you to potential dangers, but it was difficult to note it's effectiveness with all the noise from the show floor.

Besides encounters with enemies that you can resolve with your melee weapon or gun, you'll encounter situations that will simply jolt you (or at least your character) and you must rapidly tap a button to run/recover from the "cowardly position". You'll also have to watch your heartbeat meter, because too many psychological jolts (blood seemingly flooding out of a window, a monster leaping out of a pool) can supposedly send you into cardiac arrest. Oh, and you can get beaten down and kicked to death by zombies as well. Your character is controlled with the analog stick, and there are buttons for close attack, jump, and recover/stand up as well as the right trigger button to pull out and quick fire your gun.

Controlling your character with the analog stick works well for running around, but turning to face your enemy can be rather difficult. The character movement is mostly natural, aside from the delayed and odd looking jumps, and as you take physical damage you'll lose more and more blood.

As it stands the game doesn't seem to stack up to the Resident Evil franchise, but there are some unique and interesting aspects that Illbleed is attempting to bring to the genre.