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BloodRayne

by Steven Rodriguez - May 23, 2002, 5:14 pm EDT
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Well, let's put it this way... blood isn't the only thing that this game is sucking.

This game has a really good concept. You’re a smokin’ hot vampiress who needs to go unravel some sort of mystery involving Nazis, and you’ve got both really sharp swords and a wide variety of guns to pulverize your enemies with (simultaneously), and to regain life, all you need to do is grab the nearest guard with your handy-dandy grappling chain and give them the last hickey they’ll ever have.

Unfortunately, concepts don’t always make it off the drawing board the way the developer had intended for them to. The major problem with the game is the vital control. The default setup has you moving and strafing left/right with the control stick, and turning left/right and looking up and down with the C-Stick. After about a minute of back stepping into a guard that’s shooting at you from behind instead of turning around at him, you’ll start to become frustrated. The second control option isn’t much better (strafe with C, turn with control stick), main reason being that all of the control schemes that were available forces you to walk backwards instead of turning around to face something behind you when you rear back on the stick, a sin when you need to turn around fast.

The actual gameplay involves you running around and killing everything in sight. There are actually two buttons to attack, L for sword swinging and R for gun shooting. (The blades are attached to the forearms, freeing up hands for gunning.) The B button is used for grappling enemies nearby and/or diving in to the neck for a bite to eat. As mentioned, this does refill your health, but unless their “Aura" is healthy (keep reading), you won’t get much out of him. But don’t kill him beforehand; you can’t very well draw blood from someone that’s lost half of it on the ground and is severed up into three or four pieces.

BloodRayne also has some funky abilities. By moving the D-Pad, you can select a sensory mode. The “Aura" mode lets you see who would be the best enemies to eat up for health refills. There’s a Matrix-rip off mode in this game too, as all the action gets slowed down so you can better react to things. When you get attacked enough, a meter fills up that allows you to totally kick ass by pressing Y whenever it’s full.

But that’s about all there is to the good. The camera is really bad, and when coupled with the bad control, it makes the game lose half its playability. The graphics are very plain and simple, almost like an N64 game, and the textures are horrible. Although the framerate was smooth, it’s probably because the GameCube could handle graphics and textures like that in its sleep.

Although the current build was only 60%, it was pretty obvious from what I saw that there’s no way they can turn this game around before Halloween, which is its release target.

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Game Profile

Genre Action
Developer Terminal Reality
Players1
OnlineYes

Worldwide Releases

na: BloodRayne
Release Nov 18, 2021
PublisherMajesco
RatingMature
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