Captain Blood Publisher Comments on Low Review Scores

Summary

Captain Blood, a pirate-themed hack-and-slash adventure game that was initially set to release in 2006 but faced major development issues, finally launched on May 6, 2025.
Resurrected by Seawolf Studio and publisher SNEG, Captain Blood maintains the quirkiness and characteristic jank of games from that era, but this has led to middling review scores.
SNEG's co-founder believes Captain Blood's flaws are part of its charm, and that it would be a 7.5/10 game by 2010 standards.

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 Blood expectedly has its quirks and oddities, but publisher SNEG has defended them as integral tenets of its very charm.

Work on Captain Blood first began in 2003 by Akella, the developer behind the Pirates of the Caribbean game of that era. Captain Blood was 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 Blood publisher Playlogic declared bankruptcy in 2010, leaving the game's development stalled and eventually canceled. Now, Captain Blood has been completed and released by SNEG, a publisher dedicated to game preservation.

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By Charming Holiday

Captain Blood was resurrected with 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 Blood has been left untouched. Therefore, it doesn't quite carry the same level of polish as most modern games, and Captain 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 to PCGamer 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 that Captain Blood is "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 Blood clearly wears its age proudly and embraces the jank and bombast of its time, and players seem to appreciate it as well, with 68 Very Positive reviews on the game's Steam page at the time of writing. It also joins the dwindling list of pirate-themed games these days, which fans of the sub-genre will likely be happy about.

Captain Blood is 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 on major games like Roblox, even contributed in their free time just to see Captain Blood completed and in players' hands.

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