BloodRayne 2

"Good thing Rayne is hot..."

Blood Rayne 2 continues the story of Rayne, whom is half-human and half-vampire. The game is an action plat-former that centers on hand-to-hand style combat. There are also some guns and aerobic moves thrown in as well. Plus, since you are half-vampire, you can “feed” off your enemies. While the character Rayne has a lot of depth, a good back story, and is hot to top it off, this game as a whole product just isn't that great.

Graphics
Graphics are a mixed bag. The character models look good, especially Rayne, but the backgrounds are not. The textures are very simplistic. The cut scenes, however, are very well done, and a blast to watch. Overall, it seems they spent too much time on the models of the players and “cool looking” enemies. Too little time was spent on the other things.

Sound
The voices are great; especially Rayne's voice, which is done by Laura Bailey, most famous for her voice as Lust in the American version of Full Metal Alchemist. The explosions are realistic enough, but the same can't be said for the gunshots. All the guns sound like bb guns or pea shooters. Thankfully, all the slicing and deicing you do with Rayne's blades sound really cool.

Controls
The controls by themselves are ok. However, the control responsiveness is pretty bad. When you get into a button mashing contest with one of the enemies and then go from swinging your blades to kicking…there is a considerable delay. Plus, when you need to “throw” enemies, the direction you end up throwing them is never the correct way, with only a few exceptions. Overall, the controls have some issues, and that's part of why this game is rather hard.

Game play
This is the classic case of “could have been a contender”. This game starts off good enough. You are a Damphire, half vampire-half human. You run around fighting all these enemies and to heal yourself you have to drink their blood. You are acrobatic and can do some pretty cool stuff with your blades and guns. Not to mention the special powers you have, like special vision and Rage.

There is also this new method of problem solving: killing puzzles. In almost every level, you reach a point where you have to throw your enemies into or onto something in order to proceed. There are a wide variety of killing puzzles; they included throwing people into a huge fan, into garbage trucks, and even wood chippers. This usually results in a path being cleared. There is even a boss where you have to throw explosive enemies into the boss to kill it. The problem with this, as stated above, are that the controls are rather flaky when it comes to this. Plus later in the game, the puzzles get rather ridiculously hard, especially once the enemies start to block almost everything you throw at them.

This will lead me to another point. The game gets insanely hard after about the 4th or 5th level. Some of the bosses you encounter, you will NEED full rage or you are screwed. You will also come to hate the normal enemies because they will come with a pipe or hammer of some kind and they prevent you from feeding off them. Plus, once you start to get swarmed, because the controls are not as responsive as you would like them to be, just battling regular enemies can be a real hassle.

Another problem with the game is its acrobatic sections. You can jump up on poles and swing from pole to pole, and all that good stuff. However, if you have played Prince of Persia, you will laugh at how bad the game handles. Seriously, you can't move on a horizontal bar, you can only swing and “sit” on the bar. You might think this makes it easier to figure out where to go, only there are plenty of cases that you can't tell where to go because of the camera angles. At least Rayne looks cool when climbing the pipes!

Story
Here is where we have some bright spots. Rayne is a Damphire who has a grudge against her vampire father. She is going around killing everyone in his, and her, family. Most of the bosses in the game are really just violent family reunions. The main plot of the story is that all of your brothers and sisters are trying to make themselves survive in sunlight, which is every vampire's dream. Thankfully Rayne does not like vampires, nor does she want a vampire apocalypse. So as the game and story progress, you become more and more involved in thwarting this plot, and killing your family.

Then ending is ok, but it leans too much toward a sequel. Since the game did not exactly fly off the shelves, a sequel looks doubtful. Perhaps if the rights are sold to a larger publisher, like VU or Activision, then we might get to see what happens next in the games time-line.

So while there is a semi-gripping plot, this game just ends up feeling like a chore to play, especially in the later levels once the enemies become much harder. Well, I guess you could also just drool over Rayne for the whole game, it worked for me!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/26/07