Year: 2021
Type: Original Soundtrack (OST)
Composer(s): Atanas Valkov
Number of tracks: 16

★★★★★

Hard beats

While I'm still eagerly awaiting the sequel to Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines a battle royale spin-off of the series titled Bloodhuntwas released just over a year ago. Since the genre attracts me about as much as I do women in clubs (not at all), I skipped it and instead grabbed the accompanying OST with my bloodless jerk-off handles and listened to it in one go.

And it's a good one! Atanas Valkov, a Polish composer with Hungarian roots, celebrates his entry into the world of video game music with the score to Bloodhunt, , and sets the acoustic bar very high right from the start. He incorporates his professional career, which is limited to TV and film, into almost every track. Several times I had to convince myself that I was listening to a game OST and not the soundtrack to a Batman-film.

Especially in the Bloodhunt as well as Chasing Shadows themes, the over-the-top drama comes to the fore, which is at first oppressively long, but then quickly recedes into the background to give way to the dominant basses, which, accompanied by strings, create an acoustic tracking shot over a dark scene in my mind's eye. Again and again, associations with the Hans Zimmer-esque epic come to mind, as we know it from Inception or the aforementioned Batman-films by Christopher Nolan.

However, Valkov is not a copy cat and does not promise too much in Bloodhunt [Classical Version] . In comparison to the actual tenor of the score, he delivers a much more classical approach without blasting beats, but the vocals dominate here. This again evokes cinematic memories, but this time of the early Harry Potter-films with music by John Williams or Tim Burton's bat flicks.

Beyond the cinematic associations, however, Bloodhunt is not above more conventional gaming music and delivers compositions with tracks such as Targeted for Bloodhunt and Theme for Brujah, whose driving beats and use of percussion are reminiscent of games such as Wolfenstein or Left 4 Dead 2. I give it a clear recommendation and 3 ½ cloves of garlic, which could have been 4 without the irrelevant Elysium.

No.	Title	Artist(s)	Ratings
01	Bloodhunt	Atanas Valkov	5
02	Prague	Atanas Valkov	3
03	Fight Night	Atanas Valkov	3
04	Chasing Shadows	Atanas Valkov	4
05	Theme of Brujah	Atanas Valkov	4
06	Theme of Nosferatu	Atanas Valkov	4
07	Theme of Toreador	Atanas Valkov	4
08	Theme of Ventrue	Atanas Valkov	4
09	Targeted for Bloodhunt	Atanas Valkov	4
10	Vampire Blues	Atanas Valkov	3
11	The Entity	Atanas Valkov	3
12	Next Time...	Atanas Valkov	4
13	The Ultimate Predator	Atanas Valkov	4
14	Bloodhunt [Classical Version]	Atanas Valkov	5
15	Elysium	Atanas Valkov	2
16	Ambient Threat	Atanas Valkov	3