Smoke...but no cigar
BloodRayne is an attractive game, with atmospheric settings and high levels of detail in the various environments, not to mention the beautiful undead heroine of the title. Looks just don't compensate for substance in this genre though, and it soon becomes a repetitive trawl through the levels. The enemies are varied, interesting and in some cases genuinely quite frightening, however the difficulty balance seems to be all wrong. The general, everyday Nazi soldiers die without any effort whereas the larger more alarming bosses seem to verge on impossible. This makes for a very frustrating experience. I like to be challenged, but I expect to be able to win at the challenge eventually.
The plot has the potential to be very good, however it is presented poorly and at times is explained badly through garbled, off centre dialogue. Half the time I had no idea what was going on, I was simply killing Nazi's and spider creatures because they were trying to kill me. The objectives and storyline seemed to get lost somewhere. The voice acting is good, but the script is so useless and irrelevant to the plot that sound really becomes quite unnecessary.
Surprisingly I had no issues with stability, and loading times were miniscule, which was a pleasing aspect to the otherwise puzzling experience that is BloodRayne.
I'm not sure if it's a blessing or not, but the adventure is remarkably short. I completed the game first time around in well under a week, though I admit to the occasional use of cheats to get me through a couple of the ridiculously hard battles.
Rayne herself has a few special abilities and gains new ones as you advance through the game. The non-combat orientated abilities are frankly surplus to requirements, and while its nice to see different ways to chop up spiders and historical right-wing extremists the combat based special abilities really don't add much to the overall game.
I guess that the developers were trying to appeal to the audience who grew up with the early Tomb Raider games and who were now open to a similar but far more mature game. While they nail the mature element, they sadly fall appallingly short in creating something that could rival the Tomb Raider franchise in terms of gameplay. Plus with no multiplayer facility to add a different dimension to the game, the poor adventures replay value is low.
BloodRayne should be a great game - it has elements to suggest it could be, though sadly it falls short through a lack of care by its developers. It looks great though plays very badly. This could have been one of the best games that I own, though sadly it languishes towards the bottom of the pile.