BloodRayne

"Suck My Kiss"

I like girls; all kinds of them. I like British, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Asian, Icelandic, African, Irish, Scottish, French, Hispanic, and a whole crap load of other types of girls. I like it when they wear tight jeans or when they sport leg from a flowing skirt. I like long, dark and wavy hair - the kind that's constantly played with during class. I like dorky glasses that cover beautiful, jewel-like eyes. I like boobs and butts of normal proportions. I like girls that smell of sweet, freshly cut flowers. I like ‘em cute, beautiful, hot, adorable, gorgeous, and stunning. I could fall in love with almost any type of girl (but not fat chicks).

Now that I've told you all of this, let me just say that Rayne is one ugly woman.

As a half-vampire, Rayne works for an elite, secret organization to stop nazis from harnessing the deadly power of an evil god's dismembered appendages. She's also supposed to be sexy, which means she wears a skin-tight jumpsuit to reveal cleavage and show off her firm ass. It sounds sexy, but it's not on a freaky goth girl that orgasms from slurping blood out of a man's neck.

Rayne is no Kasumi of Dead or Alive fame.

As Rayne, you'll be dropped off in many large levels and asked to eliminate several targets scattered throughout the map. You'll have two arm-blades for mass amounts of needless dismemberment with the necessary buckets of blood and gore, and a small armory of firearms is just a shoulder button away from automatically gunning down the game's baddies. It sounds like some mindless fun, but trying to control your attacks is chaotic. The attack button is mapped to a shoulder button, which makes executing melee attacks awkward. In addition, combos are performed by wildly mashing buttons.

But Majesco did have some cool ideas. You can randomly slice off your enemies' arms to prevent those blasted nazis from pumping lead into your ugly body. Rayne will also have to consume fresh blood to regain health, so you'll jump on a soldier and sink those pearly whites into their supple skin. You'll not only heal yourself, but you'll even kill your enemy. You can even maneuver your victim midst feeding to use the body as a human shield for incoming enemy fire.

Yeah, man! It's cool for about an hour or two! Unfortunately BloodRayne is a six hour game. The combat really doesn't ever become any different. Sure, you'll momentarily encounter some stronger non-humans here and there, but they easily fall to a multitude of mindlessly mashed maneuvers. It also doesn't help that the level design just plain sucks. Each level is a huge labyrinth, and there aren't any in-game maps. Instead you're given mystical “vampire vision” that makes the screen blue and your targets glowing orbs that can be seen miles away. You'll end up turning on your blue eye sight crap and just dashing toward the blue orbs a lot. Personally I would have preferred stages I could actually navigate through without getting a headache.

Rayne has two other vision abilities: slowing down time (including her own movement – how useless) and a bizarre first-person eye-scope view. They're worth using one time each. What a waste!

BloodRayne is only made more annoying thanks to its complete twit of a heroine. Rayne's actress delivers her horrendous dialogue with no emotion whatsoever. I don't blame the poor girl with the garbage they wrote for her. You'll be decapitating nazi heads left and right and Rayne will just randomly spout curse words (usually the same one over and over again). Rayne's attitude is shoved down your throat constantly during lame story sequences too. At least the soundtrack perfectly embodies her personality. Nothing quite says “wannabe bad grrrrrl” as piss poor metal and generic techno!

There is one shining moment in BloodRayne. Late in the game, Rayne steals a German mech and begins blasting away other nazi mechs with payloads of missiles and a heavy machinegun. To quote my good friend lasthero (staff at www.honestgamers.com), “Hm...I don't remember any mechs in WWII...but cool...” Yeah, it is damn cool. It also lasts about five minutes and then it's back to the usual crappy ass gameplay.

BloodRayne isn't total garbage, but it's bad enough. I spent $5 to get a new copy. Had I spent $10, I'd have been pretty pissed let alone if I had dished out $50 back in the day when GameSpot hailed this as a pretty good game worthy of a 7.2 (THAT'S OUT OF TEN!?). Most games I play in the 7 range have better production values than this bad girl vampire crap fest. Control an annoying goth girl with repetitive, barely passable gameplay! Barrels of fun for people that love black metal or drooling over pictures of Elvira! Normal, hot girl loving people like me (and Sailor Bacon) will enjoy killing nazis for awhile before realizing Rayne just sucks in more than one way.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 05/24/06