I read an article about Chinese copycats and the multi-billion dollar plagiarism industry and making cheap replicas of everything from sneakers to cars and it really shocked me. I can’t get it out of my head. In the article, two identical shoe factories appeared ten meters apart on the same site, with the same equipment, machines, materials and number of workers. One made Adidas Yeezys while the other made identical copies based on the same molds, molds, machines and production methods. Some (the “originals”) sold for around 235 dollars a pair, while shoes that looked exactly the same (made ten meters further west in an identical factory) sold for around 25 dollars.
Of course, this applies to almost everything. Whatever you want to buy, you can always search Temu, Ebay, Wish or Alibaba to buy Chinese copies at a much cheaper price. The same goes for the new mobile game Blood Strike (not to be confused with Quozhou’s PC game Blood Strike), which is a blatant copy of Call of Duty: Warzone that’s laughable at times. However, as with Yeezy copies, this does not mean that the product itself is bad or even worse than the original… But it is obvious that NetEase never intended to create something of its own. So obvious it hurts. There is no originality in Blood Strike. Zero.
The design and look come directly from Call of Duty: Warzone. You start by jumping out of a plane into a huge map full of military barracks, small houses, underground passages and battlefields. You compete against 99 other players and, as in all battle royales, you have to eliminate all your opponents, survive and move towards the center of the ever-shrinking circle. The map looks very similar to Verdansk, the menus and loading system are identical to those of Warzone (1), the skins (operators) look like they were taken from Warzone 2.0 and the boxes on the ground too. This also applies to the gaming experience and how Netease has structured the various systems and functions.
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You can carry two weapons at the same time and, as in Warzone, it is best to combine a light machine gun or sniper rifle with a submachine gun with a high rate of fire and small bullets. The only difference between these games is that in Blood Strike you use medicine boxes to restore health instead of the armor plates placed on body armor in the Activision original. As is usual with this type of FPS, Blood Strike’s touch controls are pretty messy. The screen is filled with multiple buttons (which is necessary considering how complicated the game systems are in these modern battle royale games), and in my opinion it’s almost impossible to touch the right button without using your finger Swipe over another, which also forced me to have to test it with my backbone. I would say it is as necessary in this game as it is in Warzone Mobile, PUBG Mobile and the mini version of Fortnite.
It can’t be easy to create a battle royale for Android and iPhone with graphics that adapt correctly to all possible mobile models when there are 100 players on the same map. That’s why the new Warzone Mobile looks like a game from 15 years ago, as Activision obviously had to remove most of the graphics from the console version, and yet it still has performance issues. Blood Strike is better optimized than Warzone Mobile without being even uglier. The polygonal models are simple but acceptable, while the textures look old and poorly resolved, as does the lighting. It doesn’t look particularly good and I, who play on an iPhone 14 Pro Max, probably have 40-50 different action games installed that look a lot better than this. But it’s going well… You have to admit it and NetEase deserves applause for that.
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Basically, there aren’t many things in Blood Strike that can be described as bad. The presentation screams Call of Duty, as does the design, gameplay and the map itself, but most of it also feels familiar, and there’s an almost liberating factor in pure copies like this, from developers who appreciate the fact Don’t hide the fact that you’ve copied a competitor. However, the confrontations become a bit static and the atmosphere of the games is never as dramatic as in Warzone Mobile, a game that surpasses it. Still, Blood Strike is a decent battle royale, good enough to play for a few hours.
