Of Vampires and Nazis
You’re the half human-half vampire Agent BloodRayne. BloodRayne is hired by a secret organization known as the Brimstone society to protect humanity from the supernatural and the occult, as well as stopping the evil Nazi, Jurgen Wolf, from unleashing the power of some occult artifacts upon the rest of the world.
Every cliché in the book
To be perfectly honest, this is the kind of game most reviewers and hardcore gamers hate. It uses every single video game cliché there is – Nazis, Bullet time, scantily clad women – you name it, and it's here. The most unforgivable sin is that in the press releases for this game, they listed “Sex Appeal” as a feature – a crime that shall not go unpunished.
You start out in a rather murky looking Louisiana village in the early 1930’s, where a bunch of zombies have broken loose. Kill the zombies/Nazis, save the humans, move onto the next location - you know the deal. Doing all of this is particularly easy because Agent BloodRayne is ridiculously overpowered. She’s fast, very agile, has powerful blades in her arms, can use all sorts of guns and can jump onto most enemies and drain their blood (and replenish life at the same time). On top of these default abilities, Agent BloodRayne has some special powers, including the stock standard bullet time ability, and Blood Lust, which makes her even stronger and faster than she already was.
BloodRayne employs a rather frustrating style of control, as its default – the first person shooter type control method, rather than a standard 3rd person control type. Thankfully, you can change to the latter method at any point in time, but it doesn’t prevent the fact that either method can be completely unresponsive during points in the game. Camera can also be pretty bogus at points, and the player has minimal control over the viewpoint. The camera can also go into that “freeze and spin around the action” style employed in the Matrix for particularly gory events. This may have been cool back in 1999, but it’s a major annoyance in 2003.
The adventure in BloodRayne is of a decent length, but we cannot foresee that players will want to traverse through it multiple times. There’s nothing in the way of extras or bonuses which would tempt you into replaying the game.
Murky waters
BloodRayne is graphically impoverished to say the least. Character models (the “sexy” BloodRayne) seem to be lacking in detail and are blocky, jagged and unpolished. The environments have a very murky look to them. They’re not overly colourful (though you’d expect that given the theme), but they’re severely lacking in detail and other standardized special effects. The frame rate isn’t particularly consistent, and there is no evidence of a 60 Hz mode.
Audio is severely lacking. The soundtrack isn’t anything particularly overwhelming as it sticks to working in the background. Voice work is hideous – Agent BloodRayne’s voice actor is probably the least enthusiastic actor we’ve heard since voice acting became widespread. Dialog isn’t particularly inspiring – it’s just a case of “F’ this” and “F’ that”, which is needless - obviously just in there to earn the game a mature rating. Sound effects are the standardized gun sounds, slashing and blood spills, but are susceptible to an annoying popping sound throughout the game.
This game sucks (literally)
We were never really expecting much from BloodRayne, but the game which has been delivered to us just isn’t worthy of your time. What we’ve got here is a game that uses every cliché in the book, as well as having needless “sex appeal” tacked on (a cheap tactic by the publisher to try and grab a few extra sales, I bet). In reality, gamers should boycott this title because of this alleged “sex appeal”. BloodRayne is too monotonous, too ugly, and too damn generic to impress anyone.
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