BloodRayne

When you talk about this game I think you have to start by getting the bad out of the way. This game has a ton of interesting ideas but few of them are fleshed out to any great extent. You have a decent number of moves but since all your combos are activated automatically and your guns aim automatically combat ends up being pretty spam-dependent regardless. You're thrown into some locations that are cool on the surface but, when put together, are all fairly disjointed and lead to each section of the game feeling very disconnected from the other two. Pacing is also odd - the second act is longer than the other two combined. Bloodrayne can break through walls to discover new areas but this is more of an annoyance you have to deal with than anything. I'd like it if you got the opportunity to use that ability to discover secrets but this game doesn't really have anything like that other than a few weapon's caches here and there. The main contribution that the wall-destroying has is that it lead to me getting lost sometimes when I forgot I had the ability. There's lots of back-tracking and dead ends that resulted in me needing a walk through at sections. The graphics are fine but not much better than some late-era PS1 games if I'm being honest - I think Vagrant Story genuinely gives Bloodrayne a run for it's money at least in terms of model quality.

With that all out of the way we can talk about the fun parts. This game's concept is super ridiculous but it takes itself seriously and it manages to kind of work in a campy B-movie way. You're a vampire assassin who has to stop the Nazis from utilizing occult powers to take over the world. It's very dumb and, since it takes place in a (admittedly under developed) alternate history, you have a bunch of anachronistic concepts thrown in that make it even sillier. The protagonist is also very edgy and enjoys giving people the middle finger which, frankly, isn't something that translates super well into video game format. I really don't know how they did it but the devs still managed to create an atmosphere that's kind of cool despite it all. There's some cliched story beats but I still found the plot to be interesting and that helped me to take the world a little bit more seriously even if I was never super invested in it.

The main strengths here are that, as shallow as combat is, it's still satisfying. You have the ability to gib enemies to an insane degree. You can basically cut any limb off and when you have rage-mode activated your enemies basically explode. Rage-mode also lets you take out crowds of enemies in seconds.

The last boss is fairly annoying and, without spoiling anything, there's no big reward for winning. For that reason I don't see myself ever replaying Bloodrayne but I don't regret beating it once.

it's a quirky early 2000's action/adventure (well barely adventure i guess) you're a gun wielding, blade vampire..or something, the first act feels insanely different than the rest of the game. it's in a swampy Louisiana and has you climbing on telephone wires avoiding water and saving people, its eerie and atmospheric..then suddenly in act 2 you're thrown into basically Return To Castle Wolfenstein and fighting nazi's and mutants? where the fuck did that come from?
this game feels like it had some serious issues with developers agreeing on what should go into the game...the mechanics are just OK, not even good really. you basically just spam the attack button and she does whatever she feels like, or you alt attack to fire whatever gun (it barely matters what gun you use, theres only 3 categories light/heavy/special. the writing is inredibly juvanile. she constantly gives opponents and dead enemies the finger...like half a dozen times...the devs really thought it was badass, huh?

... most of the time you'll just run past everything anyways. the boss fights are kind of lame, you just activate your special attack and spam it until they die really. last boss was pretty frustrating but only cause you have to figure out how to exploit him. it was short, but kind of enjoyable. atleast theres no quicksave exploting, and in general the pacing and gameplay is frustration free, save a few parts. it feels fun enough to play through, even if mechanically it is a bit shallow.

6.5/10