Vampires and Nazis and Easy Boss fights, oh my! An enjoyable game that is a bit too easy.
The game stars you as Rayne, a vampire that works with an agency that protects the rest of the world from breakouts of the supernatural. She has been trained since her birth to complete this mission. She starts out in 1940’s Louisiana, where she has to fight a demonic outbreak that leads into a bigger conspiracy with Nazi Germany trying to use the occult to take over the world.
Taking control of Rayne in the game is quite easy. On the PC, the standard WASD key structure is in effect and it should only take a user a few minutes to get the hang of the controls. Rayne can also dual wield weapons as well. She has her standard blades that are controlled with the left mouse button, and the guns are controlled with the right button. She also has a Blood Rage that can be activated after earning enough melee kills. The Blood Rage is like a super vampire mode that pretty much wipes out anything on the screen and slows everything down to make the killing even more graphic.
Graphics are good in some places and just fugly in others. The character models are really good and show a lot of detail. And I do mean a lot of detail. The women tend to act like the women of DOA with their bouncing assets. It is pretty exaggerated. The men also look good, but you can tell that the designers put in overtime on the women. The environments also look nice, and have a good varied feeling to them. Unfortunately, I had several occasions where I got stuck in walls and clipping is quite rampant. I guess bouncing breasts take precedence over collision detection. It is nice to know that the game is compatible with widescreen resolutions. It takes some modding of the configuration file, but it works.
Sound is done nicely and really stands out. The voice overs are pretty good for the main characters, but a bit generic for everyone else. The conversations that the characters have are really funny and add a lot to the game, similar to the way they did in No One Lives Forever. The weapons sound pretty good and pack quite a punch. The feeding sounds however are very repetitive and sound like bad porn. Look, I understand that when Rayne sucks blood, it is suppose to be somewhat erotic according to vampire lore. But it does not need to sound like a late night Skinamax sex scene. The score in the background is quite nice and I would not mind having the soundtrack if they had one.
Now while the game is good, there are some things that tend to hold it back from greatness. First off, the game is just too easy. Barring a section here and there, I breezed through the game. Eight to ten hours max. The bosses that you fight are really not that hard as you progress through the game. Even the end boss was pretty simple once you figured out the pattern. That was a letdown. Also, the graphical glitches would get in the way at the most inopportune time, like in the last boss battle, I would keep getting caught in a stairwell wall and I would get shot to death.
I did not mention this before, but the cutsequences that are movies are pretty good and seem as if they were done by a good studio. I forgot about them, because there were only three or four of them in the whole game. Normally, they stuck with in engine cut scenes. They are good, but they feel totally outclassed by the video cut scenes. I would of gone with one type or another, not both.
So what are we left with? Well, it’s a decent game that will give you a nice go through. It is always nice to kill Nazis. Have we ever played a game where we wished we were not killing Nazis? It is a competent shooter that plays on the easy side of the tracks. In the end, you will have fun with the game, but you will wish you had more of a challenge during your playtime.