Blood Brothers: Command a vampire and its minions on Android

DeNA and Mobage have released a new Android game for the anti-hero: Blood Brothers, a game about a hero-turned-vampire that is out for revenge against those that have done him/her wrong. Throughout the game, you'll gather dozens and even hundreds of blood brothers or minions using the power of blood and a bit of magic, while exploring a slew of themed locales.

Basically, Blood Brothers is a streamlined RPG that sees you simply tapping on the screen to send your character down a mostly linear path. At certain points, the path will split and you'll have a decision to make. Each path has a different setup, and may result in you fighting more battles, or simply finding more coins and items than you would have otherwise. When you encounter a battle, the game takes over with each of your characters and each enemy taking turns attacking, healing or defending until you eventually (hopefully) win. At the end of a battle, experience points are dealt out to the winning party and the cycle continues.

What makes Blood Brothers interesting is the ability to use blood to form pacts with new creatures. At the end of some battles, you'll be able to use one of two kinds of blood to resurrect a fallen enemy soldier, thus earning their allegiance to your own team. One of these items is a guaranteed resurrection, while the other only offers a slight chance at earning that creature for your team (of course, you can purchase more of these guaranteed blood vials if you'd rather not risk losing out).

Each section of the game is rather small, but there are tons of individual locations to explore, with more being added in regular updates. Each individual step your character takes costs an energy point, limiting the length of play sessions, but you can complete a variety of activities while waiting for your energy to recharge. For one, you can "consume" or fuse your familiars (those creatures in your clan or guild, if you will) into your main character, gaining some of their strength and skills along the way. This helps in the case of duplicate creatures that you'll invariably possess or receive through simple random luck. As each creature has different stats, it helps to create multiple parties with different specialties,and you can have three brigades in all that can be customized by placing individual units within them, or automatically updated if you'd rather the game make these sorts of strategic decisions for you.

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Ultimately, Blood Brothers works well in pushing you to "collect them all," and there's plenty in the way of both manual customization and automatic gameplay to serve most players' needs. It's unfortunate that there isn't more (or any) actual interaction available in battles, but this more simplistic format works well in a mobile game that can be easily picked up and played for a matter of seconds or a matter of minutes whenever you get the chance.

Stay tuned for more on Blood Brothers, as we'll work on bringing you some tips and tricks to get started.

Click here to download Blood Brothers on Google Play --->

Have you tried Blood Brothers on your Android device? Do you have tips for your fellow players? Share them in the comments!