Bloodrayne is an action adventure game with a horror twist. You play as Rayne, a female dahmpir half human/half vampire thing along the lines of Blade. The game is made by Terminal Reality, the same company that made Nocturne. In an interesting side note, The dahmpir character that escorted you in the first mission in Nocturne was essentially proto Rayne They ended up pretty much using her exact character design for the Bloodrayne games. So I guess it could sort of be considered a spinoff of Nocturne. Anyway you play as Rayne who works for a paranormal investigation organization in the 1930's, like in Hellboy or again like in Nocturne.Looking at the game art, you'd expect Rayne to be wild and slutty. She will make a quip on occasion but for the most part she has a comparable demeanor to Daria from the show on MTV.
The first mission is in Louisiana where there is a strange outbreak of some weird gigantic bug that also seems to be possessing people and turning them into zombies. (This kind of thing happens a lot in Louisiana.) Also the town you are in is completely flooded. This would be kind of cool if you weren't a dahmpir and susceptible to water. What the hell were they thinking? They didn't have ANY other agents that they could have used for this? They specifically send the person that gets hurt by water? What a bunch of assholes. Getting around is often done by hopping from roof to roof or mausoleum to mausoleum or running on top of phone lines. That phone line running bullshit is awful. You're supposed to be able to just jump on and run but they make it next to impossible to get on. There's no general area around the wires that you can jump into and then automatically snap to the wires. You have to literally jump and land directly on the fucking wire. Once you accomplish this, you're snapped to the wire. But until then you're jumping up and down like a dumbass, probably slowly dying in knee-deep water, desperately trying to get up. Come on! YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TRYING TO DO!
The game offers you a handful of different control schemes including a left-handed one and a first person one... and they are all complete shit. I think the first one I tried was the one that allowed you to strafe because I like strafing. I quickly decided it was extremely awkward and chose the scheme that was as close as I could get to normal. Now get this; the left joystick moves Rayne forward and back. Left and right makes her rotate, (while standing still.) They replicated exactly how a directional pad works using a joystick. I don't even know where to begin. Directional pads have no place in 3D games unless it's for a menu screen. Moving with them is stiff and tedious. That kind of shit should have been abolished in the prior console generation. If you have a joystick, why would you make it work like a directional pad? It should work like a fucking joystick. That's why you have a joystick as opposed to a directional pad. If I wanted to use the directional pad, I'd use the directional pad. Imagine if someone made a mouse that worked like arrow keys. It could only move in one linear X or Y direction at a time. It doesn't make any sense. The other joystick, (the right one,) is used only for camera pitch, (looking up or down.) That's it. This is also completely wrong. When you rotate Rayne with the left stick, the camera stays behind her and turns as well. So you basically have half of the camera controls on one stick and half on the other and then you have back, forward and rotate. Why can't it just be push left stick, go that direction, push right stick, camera pans that direction like every other fucking game that exists? The funny thing is that even though I knew the right stick only went up and down, I caught myself trying to pan the camera around with it. Even by the end of the game, I was still doing it.
Rayne's combat is divided into guns and her signature arm blade things. The guns are duel wielded, always paired by strength. You can also carry a couple of incendiary devices and one special weapon which is like a light machine gun or RPG. Guns are decent but you run out of ammo pretty quick, especially the special weapons. Am I shooting three bullets at once or something?
The blades are just... They suck. Combat with them is severely unsatisfying.
You press a single button for a blade attack more or less of Rayne's choosing and that's about it. Keep mashing that button until whatever you're fighting dies. The blades also lack any real sense of impact. It feels like you're just slapping people around with a foam pool noodle until their appendages fall off. They don't do nearly as much damage as they realistically should, either. What's a good amount of strikes from a short sword that an ordinary non-armored man should be able to take before they are dispatched? Like 1-3 maybe? Sometimes it seems like they can take a dozen. Then there's the assholes that can block your attacks indefinitely with their gun. I could jump around them and try to find an opening but I like just using guns when it happens. Block this, bitch!There's also a harpoon that you can use that works exactly like Scorpion's harpoon. You can use it to pull an enemy to you and suck their blood. Blood sucking is the only thing that heals you. Sometimes you'll need to do it while in combat. Luckily you can use your victim as a shield while you do it so that's cool.
You have a blood meter which is like your devil trigger, overdrive or whatever you want to call it. You can activate it when it's full and your attacks do 5X damage. I deactivate it ASAP to keep the meter as close to full as possible all the time because you never know when you're going to step into a barracks or a mess hall with 20 fucking nazis in it. When I beat the first boss, Colonel Klink came and stole the knife relic that I found inside it. Then suddenly the next chapter started and I was in a military base in Nazi Germany. What the hell just happened? Why am I here? There was absolutely no transition. At first I thought it was a flashback for some reason. Then I thought it was a completely unrelated mission, (like how Nocturne had four totally different/separate missions.) It wasn't until I completed chapter two that I realized that this was a continuation and I was in for a long mind-numbing drag-out of essentially killing the same two types of nazis for the rest of the game.
The levels are huge. Probably about 40% of the areas you don't even need to go through. There's just a ton of extraneous places. You can get lost in them for days, (even while using your spidey sense.) The whole objective is to assassinate a bunch of high ranking nazi officials. There are like 20 of them. You get a big photo list that you check off as you go. When I first saw the list, all I could feel was dismay. There are so many targets and the place is so big and the combat is so repetitive and so boring. The whole thing is just a giant load of drudgery.
On top all that, there are no checkpoints in the game and quite often you will find that save points are too far apart. You only get to save in between areas. So wander around a giant facility, kill three minibosses and however many waves of grunts that appear without dying or you start at the beginning of the area. I think I tried the first area of the second chapter around five times with nothing to show for it. This was when I started using the ingame cheat codes. If I died, I'd turn on godmode, go back to where I was, turn it off and pretend it never happened. Typically, I'm no cheater, nor am I a candy ass. I beat Shinobi for PS2 on hard mode and that is one of the most cruel games I've ever played. It also has no checkpoints. Even though it is completely sadistic and unfair, it's still fun to play. Bloodrayne doesn't feel rewarding and it doesn't feel fun, so fuck it. I'm sorry but I'm not engaged enough to keep repeating the area indefinitely until I can cross a mine field while three assholes take potshots at me with rocket launchers, defeat a large mech unit, run across a long exploding bridge and then defeat a colonel surrounded by soldiers wearing jetpacks in a single go. (NOT A HYPERBOLE)
Then there are times where you're critically low on health and need to feed so you're looking for victims but all of the enemies use guns so it's impossible to get within range of them without dying. So you're sneaking around every corner like a little bitch because you're so scared that someone will oneshot you and the half hour you've invested into the level will be erased.
The only time I didn't use the cheats, excluding the first chapter, was for bosses because they actually had the decency to make bosses checkpoints.
After two solid chapters of hunting down specific nazi targets in giant military bases. I thought the game was over. I got to see a cut scene with lots of blood and dismemberment. It was hands down the best thing in the game next to the Siegfried and Roy twins. Then chapter four started and I got to see the new list of targets.
.................FUCK!
