Rayne: lethal beauty.
This beautiful and sexier than ever “dampyr” (half human, half vampire) is well known because of her bloody ways, and she’s also one of the best videogame vixens.
The first episode took place during the WW2, now adventure starts and goes on during modern times, and time doesn’t seem to pass for Rayne (I guess it’s obvious, since she’s half a vampire); her father, Kagan (wasn’t he died?!), has come back with a mysterious substance, the “shroud”, which let the vampires create a sort of protective curtain against direct sunlight, and he wants to start a new era, with vampires ruling on the world and human beings as simple food: Rayne, the dampyr, is mankind’s only hope.
Gameplay. That’s the best part of the game.
Rayne’s moves, combos and capabilities have been highly improved.
In the first game she used to shoot a lot, and combat techniques were pretty repetitive and boring: in this episode fights are prevalent, but you can choose how you prefer to terminate your foes.
As I was saying, there are combos for both her blades and stiletto-boots; you can quickly finish enemies by feeding upon them, and just a little before sucking the last drop of their blood you can perform one of the many fatalities, that allow you to fill your Rage bar; by filling this bar you can let Rayne to perform her powers and abilities.
You can make your health and rage bars longer: in order to do it, you have to perform, whenever you see hazards in the environment, deadly tricks against your opponents: but sometimes you have to perform these actions in order to go on through the game, and in this case they are known as “kill puzzles” (LITERALLY).
In the first episode you could choose among a large quantity of weaponry; now your only friends, apart from your teeth, your blades, your kicks and your harpoon (aren’t they enough?) are the Carpathian Dragons: basically, they are some kind of multi-function pistols that let you choose what’s the best fire mode for the enemy you’re facing; you can upgrade every fire mode up to three times and you don’t need bullets, since they work with blood.
So you can feed not only Rayne but your pistols too: and when you run out your enemies’ blood, Carpathian dragons start to suck Rayne’s blood!
Moves are now more interesting: Rayne slide on pipes and stair rails (and at the same time she can slice and shoot her foes), she can swing from bar to bar and climb poles, she can cling on to scaffoldings; as usual, Rayne must feed on her enemies to replenish her health bar or simply to quickly kill them.
You can’t count on all of her lethal powers since the beginning of the story, but you can make our dampyr stronger by killing bosses.
Controls. Controlling Rayne is funny and quite easy. You can choose if you prefer to fight without distinction against a bunch of enemies or you can focus your attention on one of them by blocking him with the left trigger.
Unfortunately, Bloodrayne 2 cannot be definitely described as technically excellent.
There are some terrible glitches that afflict the game.
For instance: in a point of the game (the level is Club Strages), if you don’t kill enemies with your harpoon, you can’t continue and you must restart the level!
In some points of the environments Rayne gets easily stuck among polygons of the environment itself, so you can’t move, and if there isn’t an enemy killing you, and allowing so to restart from the last checkpoint, once again you have to restart the level!
During the most frenetic action, controlling the camera is hard and inaccurate. And there are problems with frame rate slow down.
Graphics. The game is very violent but not excellent graphics make it less frightening.
I mean, whenever you slice your opponents there is blood everywhere, heads and limbs flying away, and there are a lot of hazards in the environments to kill your foes, but everything is so overemphasized and extreme to be, in a certain sense, funny; I mean, that’s the same violence you can see in movies like Evil Dead, Kill Bill or Sin City: there are some crude scenes, that’s true, but you feel you can accept them because you comprehend that in that context they fit well.
As usual, Rayne is fantastic, and you can see her (after you beat the game once) in about ten different outfits; she moves fluent but I can’t say her design and textures are the best you can find; and the same can be said about punks, monsters and bosses: not bad but nothing more.
Most of environments are evocative, and some of them are quite detailed, you can destroy many objects and you can use in your advantage every hazard you find to perform death traps.
CG cut scenes and video clips are embarrassing, pixels are as big as elephants, they seem to be bad quality and low bit-rate dvx, and I can claim, with no worry to get wrong, that they are simply some of the worst I’ve seen on the 128 bit generation consoles, and I remember something better even on the first Playstation.
Music is rock, good to listen because it gives its contribution to make action more frenetic and stimulating; soundtracks are original and they always fit the level.
Sound effects and voices are in keeping with philosophy of the game: very funny, on some circumstances vulgar though, Rayne’s and punks’ dialogues.
Tilt. I must admit I appreciate programmers’ efforts to make this second episode better than the first one: Rayne is more charismatic and lethal than ever, and if you appreciate her you will probably bear technical glitches and bugs, the main problems of the game.