Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Chaos Bleeds

Every wooden chair in Sunnydale is ammunition. Smash one and you get a stake with a handful of uses in it before it splinters, which turns each room into a supply problem: count the crates, count the vampires, work out whether you can afford to waste a swing. That small piece of resource logic is what keeps the combat honest, because the punching and kicking on its own is serviceable at best. A vampire only dusts when you finish it properly, and running dry with three of them still standing is a genuinely bad afternoon.

Eurocom took over from The Collective, who had made the Xbox-only first game, and widened the frame considerably. Chaos Bleeds rotates through six playable characters across its chapters — Buffy, Willow, Xander, Spike, Faith and Sid the Dummy — each with their own reach, speed and tricks, so Willow leans on spells while Xander mostly survives by being resourceful. The story, written by Christopher Golden and Tom Sniegoski with Ethan Rayne stirring things and the First Evil behind the curtain, was pitched as an unaired episode, and it holds that shape well enough that fans of the show can slot it into the timeline without wincing.

Most of the television cast turned up to record, with Giselle Loren standing in for Sarah Michelle Gellar as she had in the earlier game. The writing catches the rhythm of the dialogue better than most licensed products of the period managed, which matters here, because the between-fight material is doing a lot of the work.

What has aged is the structure. Levels are corridors and courtyards with locked doors and switches, the camera fights you in tight spaces, and the platforming sections exist mainly to remind you that this engine was not built for them. There is a multiplayer mode with a roster of unlockable demons, and it is a novelty rather than a reason to keep the disc in the tray. Play it for the fiction and for the moment a chair leg becomes the only thing between you and the floor.

As sixth-generation TV adaptations go, this one clearly had people working on it who watched the show. That is rarer than it should be, and it carries the game further than its punches do.