| |
Release Date: October 15, 2002

Hands-on BloodRayne

The blood thirstiest supernatural secret operative this side of Wesley Snipes is coming into its own.

The last time we saw Terminal Reality's BloodRayne, the backbone of an innovative third-person action game was in place but the basic elements of the game like a solid framerate and fluid animation were lacking. As a half-human half vampire-hero, BloodRayne has plenty of attack moves and powers at her fingertips and in her fangs, but the most recent versions we've seen running n PS2, Xbox and GameCube are really starting to do her some supernatural justice.

By now we should all know BloodRayne's backstory. Her mama is human but her daddy is all vampire, giving BloodRayne the very best of both worlds. That is, she can hangout during daylight hours and walk into a church, but she still has to drink blood regularly and is quite the physical specimen. She plies her trade for the Brimstone Society, the secret organization that has taken it upon themselves to snuff out supernatural things in the world. The mystery of the game promises to be thick as you travel from Louisiana to Argentina to Germany trying to prevent a familiar, yet diabolical Nazi plan of using the occult to strengthen their army.

Now that we can fully appreciate the animation of our vampire hero, all of her abilities should be more than enough to deal with that Nazi threat. As far as weapons go, Rayne has a pair of razor sharp blades attached to her forearms that are just as lethal retracted as they are when extended. Even when she's firing weapons using the right trigger/shoulder button, she can always use her slashing attacks on the left trigger/shoulder button if she needs to. The slashing attacks is the key to BloodRayne's Blood Rage attack. As she hacks and slashes enemies her Bloodlust meter increases until she's ready to Rage. While in Rage the screen turns a light shade of red and all of her movements are accelerated and a whole new arsenal of attack moves is opened up but using the same melee or shooting attack controls. So in Blood Rage double tapping the left trigger gives you a more deadly and dramatic slashing sequence than just a regular double slash move. There's no better way to clear a room of Nazis or those nasty looking parasites that look like human heads on worm bodies.

The weapon system is so simple it will probably see its way into other similar games in a matter of months. BloodRayne can pick up weapons enemies drop like pistols, assault rifles, sniper rifles and special weapons like rocket launchers, use them and dump 'em when they run out of ammo. If she picks up three pistols each with seven rounds, she's not carrying one pistol with 21 rounds. She's carrying those three pistols and will drop each one once it's dry and move on to the next if she needs to keep blasting. Also, rather than micromanaging her eight weapon inventory, you simply toggle the weapon type you want her to emphasize: heavy or light. With heavy weapons selected, she always keeps the bigger machine guns handy as long as she's got one in her inventory. There are also special weapons that you will have to manually select from her weapon menu since these tend to be more powerful and serve special functions.

BloodRayne also has a harpoon she can use a la Scorpion from Mortal Kombat to hook and drag enemies across a room. She doesn't holler out "Get over here!" but she does yank the victim towards her once it's lodged in the neck or throat. When the enemy is drawn back towards her she automatically jumps on his chest and starts sucking the blood from his neck to feed her need for blood. In fact, this feeding is a crucial part of the game mechanic. Her life force is draining extremely slowly throughout the game but damage from enemies of course accelerates this process so she needs to feed on enemies often to keep her health up. Or, using the same button on a nearby enemy, she can simply hop onto a soldier, wrap her legs around him and get to sucking on that neck from the front or from behind. This is where the sexiness of our heroine comes into play, even though having your blood drained by a busty vixen is usually considered sexy in certain, less publicized circles. The cool thing is, since she's vulnerable while sucking either from the front or from the rear, she can turn the victim's body around so that it takes damage from nearby enemies that might be shooting at her.

The harpoon method uses the game's improved auto targeting to help you line up your enemies. The auto targeting itself is better but still not where you'd want it to be for a game that's this quick and action packed. She'll automatically aim each weapon in each hand at separate enemies and move on to the next one when they drop but it's extremely easy for enemies to move in on you while you're locked and firing on another one or two.

Visually, BloodRayne is looking particularly smooth and silky on the GameCube and Xbox versions we saw, less so on the PS2. (It's good looking on PS2, but not quite as nice as the Xbox and GameCube.) The lighting in the Xbox game is right on par with what you'd expect out of Microsoft's machine. Enemies have detailed facial features with spectacles, looks of terror and sneers clearly visible. Each one of her moves is clearly animated so you can tell the difference between all of her different slash attacks. When she switches weapons you can see her reach for the new weapon strapped to her back (they start to pile up all over her body when you've got eight different guns) and pull it out as her arm blades snap back into their rest position along her forearms.

The pacing of BloodRayne is extremely quick even when you're not using Blood Rage. She slashes and hacks and shoots like an old pro. However the balancing between the pace of the game and the camera control still needs to be tuned a bit. You have full camera control on the right analog stick with the left analog stick moving you forward and back and strafing you left or right. Too many times however enemies were able to get the drop on us because the camera couldn't stay behind her and swing around as fast as we were able to execute attacks. She was swinging blades but hitting nothing but air as the enemies easily avoided them in mid slash. Terminal Reality's engine is more than capable of delivering a super quick game but it's a matter of what gamers will be able to keep up with. Speeding up the camera controls to make them more twitchy would allow you to engage enemies with ease, but it could lead to serious bouts of motion sickness even for veteran console gamers. If this issue is addressed and a few other easily fixable animation tweaks should have BloodRayne looking like a surprise contender when it lands on PS2, Xbox, GameCube and PC this November.

blog comments powered by Disqus
Become a fan of IGN

Game Details

Published by: Majesco
Developed by: Terminal Reality
Genre: Third-Person Action
Release Date:
United States: October 15, 2002
UK: May 22, 2003
Japan: August 26, 2004
Australia: Unreleased
MSRP: 7.99 USD