Upon starting a game, you will be taken through a tutorial with all of the game's playable characters, aside from the demon-hunting dummy Sid. With Buffy and Faith you are able to dish out the pain and vanquish vampires to piles of dust with drop-kicks and stakes. With Xander, you use a variety of weapons to fight your way out of bad situations. Spike allows you to beat up baddies like a Slayer, and Willow employs magic as a witch and casts some neat little spells. You will have a chance to play as all these characters while the game progresses, but for a good portion of the experience you will be fighting as the Slayer herself, Buffy. Each character has a variety of moves more akin to an A-list fighting game such as Tekken or Virtual Fighter than a brawler such as this.

The game looks good with some impressive texture work and character models. For the most part, the models for the Buffy gang look good, sans Spike's and Willow's, which look awkward and mediocre. Xander, Giles, Sid and Buffy all look good, as does Faith, and with the camera being drawn so far in, you will have plenty of time to look. Enemies, as with recent games like Brute Force, come in only a few varieties with endless clones of each wanting to suck your blood. Environments are detailed enough for the game's dark appearance and Chaos Bleeds doesn't suffer from too much noticeable stuttering or slowdown even with multiple baddies on the screen.

Sound is what you would expect from a TV-endorsed show. All the sound effects you have grown accustom to over the show's run are present, and for the most part all of the cast are reprising their roles. Several actors (namely Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan) refrained from providing their voices, so sound-alikes were employed with mixed success. The actress who provides Buffy's voice is dead on; however, Willow's stand-in gives the character even more of a whiny overtone than she already had. Let's just say the cutscenes without Willow talking are my favorites.

The game features the patented Buffy one-liners fans of the show have grown to love over its run. All the characters have something to say when coming to a locked door, dispensing with a vampire or other enemy, or talking to each other in cutscenes. Most of the one-liners are funny and fit in with the rest of the game nicely; however there will be times when you hear the exact same one over and over again without much variety. Music is basic fare without anything too interesting to take your mind away from the constant barrage of baddies coming your way.

Like any 3D adventure game, good or bad, Buffy features puzzles to tickle your brain. Unfortunately, most of the time these puzzles, although much better than some games I have played, fail to really become anything more than tedious filler material designed to make the game a bit longer. Early in the game you will need to find several pieces of a broken dial dispersed throughout a graveyard in order to open a door. It becomes a very boring task to locate these pieces with so many mausoleums that look exactly the same and only a select few that actually allow you to enter. Next, you need to find a way to power a mechanical bridge over a vat of toxic sludge. If anything, they should be easy enough to complete since Buffy always seems to know what she needs, and because pieces aren't scattered over multiple levels, puzzles turn into an inanimate game of hide-and-seek.

Buffy's multiplayer mode, although featuring a few varieties of gameplay, can't take the place of such games as Super Smash Bros. Melee or Mario Karts. Up to four players can participate (you will need a multitap for the PlayStation2 version of the game) in Survival (last player alive), Slayer Challenge (one slayer, three player controlled enemies), Domination (control specific points on a map) and Bunny Catch (a battle for bunnies).

The biggest problem with the game isn't the shoddy collision detection, but the camera. The camera's focus is drawn too far in to play the game, especially with some questionable AI here and there. From time to time you will bet nailed by an enemy just off the screen because you actually didn't see them. This poses a bigger problem when you add in a sometimes unforgiving AI that likes to send a gang of baddies your way and then hit you with cheap shots while you are fighting another monster. You could have your back turned, ready to stake an ugly-looking vamp and get bashed in the back, knocking you down. These sorts of occurrences don't happen often if you use the patented hit-and-run tactic pioneered in the screen-filling Diablo series.

For a fan of the series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds, besides having a ridiculous title, is a solid 3D beat 'em up in the vein of 2D brawlers of the past. On the outside it looks like your classic Streets of Rage game with hordes of enemies coming your way with the intent to do some bad stuff to your face. As an added bonus, completing portions of the game unlocks DVD-like extras including interviews, new multiplayer characters and other goodies any Buffy fan would be sure to enjoy. Don't mistake that statement to mean classic 3D action/adventure fans won't have fun playing through Chaos Bleeds, but true fans of the series will understand the backstory and character interaction much more than newbies, and therefore have more fun experiencing their favorite show.

In the end if you can displace your thoughts about the questionable camera and sometimes cheap AI, you are in for a button-smashing experience set in the rich world of the Buffy-verse with a talking dummy and lots of candidates for facial reconstruction surgery.