Same gory action from the first game. Liked the first game? You'll enjoy Bloodrayne 2 if you did.
Okay, we last left off when Rayne, a sexy female dampyr who's half human and half vampire, discovered that the Brimstone Society found out about her father in 1939...but something went wrong and lost him. Present day, Rayne is instead doing a secret mission on getting rid of vampires that roam around in the streets and factories, and Rayne, along with her informer, Severin, are wondering why. So many mysteries....
Gameplay:
In this sequel of Bloodrayne, the gameplay has some minor changes to make the whole thing more intense and stylish. The whole concept, like in the first game, is a third person action game. Rayne is equipped with 2 long blades that are attached to her arm. With this, she slices and dices each victim in numerous ways. You'll be chopping arms off, cutting bodies in half, and the list goes on. Rayne also is equipped with her own guns called dragons. The dragons use blood as ammo, and your weapons range from pistols, a shotgun, a flamethrower, and so on. All these guns get more powerful the more you use them. Rayne, being a dampyr, must need blood to fill up her health and her guns. So she does them by biting on the punks to suck blood for her health or to fill up her ammo on her guns. If you run out of blood in the ammo, then the guns will take Rayne’s own health for blood. So you'll be refilling up quite often.
Rayne also has special powers that pretty much make her invincible. She has an aura vision to find her enemies through walls and to find secret entrances. She also can slow down time or freeze time even to avoid some critical attacks that your enemies try on you. Then there's the all time favourite, Blood Rage. You'll have a meter which indicates how long you can use blood rage, which increases the more you use your normal blades on the various enemies you encounter. Rayne will even get more advanced powers as you progress through the game, making her much more dangerous. So there are multiple ways to kill people, all of which are stylish and entertaining.
When going through levels, you'll usually have brainless punks or vampires trying to kill you. There will be some cases where you need them as an advantage to progress. Since you are also equipped with a harpoon, you can release it to your enemies and throw them wherever you please. Sometimes you'll have to them into a machine or something in order to make it explode or something. When you're not killing people for blood, you can do various acrobatic and active moves, such as swinging and climbing on poles and grinding down on rails to get to certain points of the level. It takes a bit to get used to, but it's pretty fun for the most part. There are a couple puzzles to figure out when going through levels as well. Though they aren't difficult, it's a bit confusing figuring out what kind of action Rayne has to do in order to access it. And then you'll have a lot of bosses with require more caution and different ways of killing them, but, in general, it's pretty easy.
All these actions are used often and can be a little repetitive at times. But if you like senseless action packed gory games, then Bloodrayne 2 has a worthy gameplay setup.
Graphics:
Bloodrayne 2 has some improvements over the first game graphically. The character models look better than ever, and the environments are nicely designed and detailed with urban environments as well as some gothic looking places too. Bloodrayne 2 has a lot of cutscenes, a couple which are FMV sequences, and they look great. However, the rest of the cutscenes are in-game, and they aren't as impressive. The physics are also kinda cool when Rayne chops off various body parts and show lots of splattering blood and gore clearly being displayed (It wasn't rated M for no reason you know ;) ). There are a couple minor flaws to point out though. The animations for some characters models are a little...robotic. Also, the frame rate can slow down whenever there's a lot of action going on. But aside from these minor flaws, Bloodrayne 2 looks good.
Sound:
The music is intense with heavy guitars and drum beats, rather then the war and gothic style of music from the first Bloodrayne. The music itself is good to listen to while playing, but don't expect anything too memorable, with the exception of a couple tracks. The voice acting is slightly better then the first game, thankfully. The voice actress for Rayne returns and shows a lot of gutsy personality for her character, and it all sounds good. The other voices are pretty good too, but nothing groundbreaking. The sound effects are very effective and get the job done well for this game.
Conclusion:
The game itself isn't very long, because you'll beat the story in 10 hours or less. If you can't stand doing the same thing over and over again, then you'll likely never play the game again after playing. However, Bloodrayne 2 fixed one problem that the first game had: extras. Not to say that the sequel has a lot of that stuff, but there are a couple things worth coming back for, such as unlocked CG art, cutscenes, costumes, ect. But even then, there's isn't a lot to come back to when beating the game. It would've been more fun if there were more extras, such as maybe a multiplayer mode or co-op. Nevertheless, if you're up for something action packed to play that's very stylish as well as entertaining; don't hesitate to give Bloodrayne 2 a try.
Pros:
-Improved gameplay (in some ways) over the first.
-Good stylish graphics
-So many ways to kill vampires and punks
-The dragon guns are cool
Cons:
-Though improved, Bloodrayne 2 still feels repetitive sometimes
-Replay value is still not deep
-Would've been nice to have multiplayer or co-op.