by:	November 07, 2004

BloodRayne was one of the greater sleeper hits not to long ago and was quickly followed up by the appropriately titled, BloodRayne 2. In the title you have a lot of interesting options for gameplay, tons of destructible environments, and a super-sleek and sexy vampire heroine. Born from the unnatural union of vampire and human, BloodRayne is blessed with the powers of a vampire but cursed with the unquenchable thirst for blood and a weakness to sunlight. BloodRayne 2 challenges the supernatural anti-heroine with her most personal battle yet as she hunts down each of her wicked siblings who are carrying on the legacy of their dead father, Kagan. They have created “The Shroud,” a mysterious substance which, when released, renders the sun’s lethal rays harmless to vampires. Now only BloodRayne stands between an unsuspecting humanity and a horrifying vampire dawn.

BloodRayne 2 is chop full of interesting gameplay mechanics. When you fight, you can slice your enemies up with your arm blades, kick them around or finish them off by sucking their blood. Sucking there blood doubles as a way of rejuvenating your life bar. If you press the punch or kick button in combination with it, you finish the thug you are feeding from in a totally awesome way. The bad thing about the game is, sometimes you are overwhelmed with thugs, guns firing, and avoiding other obstacles. Because of this you may find yourself spending a lot of time feeding off of people just to keep Rayne’s health bar up. Then there are a few variations and new combos that Rayne picks up but you can’t help but think a lot of it is for show, when the combo isn’t half as effective as just some plain kicking. You acquire new combos by finishing off bosses, and most of the boss fights in the beginning of the game are pretty much the same slashing and dashing. The thugs in the game really don’t vary that much nor are they that smart. The most challenge you will get from them is their great numbers, or if they come packing a weapon to hit you with. In this case all you have to do is flip behind them and kill them from behind, or slow down the movement with one of Rayne’s powers, even this though is just a bad solution for the inconsiderably placed thugs so that you may at least have an idea of who is hitting what. The power to slow things down to “bullet-time speed” isn’t even that effective unless you acquire the ability to slow things down, and speed Rayne up.
Another one of Rayne’s powers allows her to see goals, which is definitely helpful when you are in a huge jumbled up area. Another one of her powers, and probably the most useful is her Rage power. If you use the Rage powers, along with causing enough havoc by “creatively” destroying your enemies it builds up a gauge until your power and health gauge completely replenishes and you are temporarily invincible. Rayne also has a chain harpoon that she shoots out of some sort of magical orifice (I have no idea how it just springs out of her hand) and it somehow is able to push enemies around in very weird, unrealistic ways. Sometimes you have to feed an object bodies to progress in a level. An example of this is you are stuck in a bar engulfed in flames and the only way out is a ventilation fan so, naturally you harpoon thugs and fling them into the fan until it busts open. Besides that the harpoon is pretty useless, and is used for nothing else other than to get enemies away from you. Another questionable weapon as Rayne’s disposal are her blood guns. These guns feed off of blood in a chamber, but once gone they begin to feed off of Rayne. They are not really that effective due to some shotty targeting mechanics in the title, and are really only helpful to destroy explosive objects. The targeting in BloodRayne is ok, and usually works well enough, but it can often be troublesome especially with tons of enemies in the area.