Gaming Target - Xbox: BloodRayne

Written by Leigh Culpin on November 30, 2002

Full Review: Half vampire, half human, and damn good-looking!!

BloodRayne is a third-person action game from Terminal Reality, and it's easily one of the best to hit the Xbox thus far. However, it's a guilty pleasure, and if you can make your way through this game you're going to be desensitized to a lot for a long time. Not for the light of heart, BloodRayne lets you take command of Agent Rayne, a half-human, half-vampire agent who works for a secret society that takes on Nazis and various supernatural threats. While it does have a few flaws, it's such a great game that you'll be able to overlook them very easily.

The game starts you off in the smallest of the three main areas, which really serves more as a training session than anything, and will likely take you around an hour or so to complete. You could easily beat the entire game in 6 or 7 hours if you decide to just blow through it, but you could also add a couple hours onto that if you like using slow-motion a lot and methodically taking apart your enemies rather than just killing everything as quickly as possible. While it will get a bit repetitive near the end, the game switches settings and adjusts the storyline just in time to save the game from being boring, as is the case with the transition from the second (and debatably longest) area to the third. You'll get to known how Agent Rayne moves, and how to use her basic skills and weapons. After completing the first area, you'll be awarded one of Rayne's special sight modes Ц there are four total Ц which lets you slow down the world around you and dodge bullets, a la The Matrix or Max Payne. This feature is certainly very cool, and comes in handy when you're swamped with enemies or overwhelmed by a boss's power and need to think a bit while on the run. The other vision modes include a Predator-like view, which shows you your enemies' health and current state of awareness, and gives you limited visibility through walls and a sniper-like zoom vision. The Predator-ish mode also shows you where your next objective is located, and thankfully tones down the possibility of aimless wandering in some of the rather sizeable levels.

BloodRayne's combat system in the game is top-notch, with some amazing animations and lots of dismemberment possibilities. You'll gain more powerful attacks as you progress throughout the game, including more powerful Blood Lust attacks Ц Blood Lust is gained by completing objectives and killing enemies, and once the meter's full you can enter a Blood Lust for a limited time and gain substantially more powerful (and cooler) attacks. This also slows time a bit, and blurs the edge of your vision, a very cool effect which can make the rather gory game that much more vivid. The guns in the game are also a lot of fun to use Ц both hands auto-aim, but independently when applicable, so you can run into a room, shoot the guy in front of you, run past his falling body, shoot to both your right and left at the same time, go into slow-mo, flip sideways and cut the last guy's head off with your wrist blades. Gory, yes, but this is a typical scene in the game and they tend to be a lot of fun to experience. There's even one boss level with destructible pillars that, oddly enough, closely resembles the Matrix lobby sceneЕ but with more to blow up. Speaking of which, nearly everything in the environments is damageable, and the cloth even tears and responds realistically to your contact with it. The game physics, while sped up, are generally really well done, and even Rayne's hair moves extremely well and caused me much astonishment for some time.

Heath is generally not an issue in the game, since you can feed on nearly anything human and many things not. This replenishes your health, not to mention the fact that you can still fire weapons while clinging on to someone and biting into their neck, and you can even turn the way they're facing and use them as a human (or at least living) shield. There aren't really any power ups in the game, simply weapons, which are all placed where one would expect to find them, in lockers or on bodies. There is actually quite an admirable arsenal of weapons, including rocket launchers and shotguns, and you'll definitely find them to be a valuable asset. In fact, one could probably go through most of the game using only guns, which would be almost as fun as going through using only Rayne's wrist blades. The dismemberment caused by the blades is very well done, and collision detection is generally bang-on.

Graphics in the game are very good, though not astonishing. Rayne especially looks phenomenal, with some great animations. The textures are all sharp and crisp, and the majority of the enemies are well done. The bosses all look spectacular, and the voice acting that accompanies them is generally really well done as well. Rayne too has some good one-liners, and some decent dialogue that moves the surprisingly decent (if predictable) storyline along.

The only real problems with this game are very minor things that you'll never really notice unless you're looking for them, and the fact that the game doesn't hold a lot of replay value beyond the second or maybe third play through. Cheat codes built into the game could prolong the life of it if you really enjoy the weapons and might like to go all out with them for an extended amount of time, rather than conserving ammo, but there isn't really a whole lot that will beckon you back again and again. You might beat it a couple times, put it away, and come back to it in a month or so, but you're not going to play through it on all the difficulties one after another like you might have done with something like Halo.