A Flawed Beauty
Bloodrayne is not typically a series name that evokes a sense of quality, but the new art direction and game design of the most recent entry, Bloodrayne Betrayal, has breathed some life into this undead action series. Unfortunately, while the game presents some fantastic concepts that the series should draw from in the future, there are some basic design flaws that make the game an absolute frustrating mess at times.
The impression you get from the beginning of the game is fantastic, as the art direction and animations for this new Rayne are absolutely beautiful. She moves fluidly from combo to combo, and has an agility reminiscent of Dante when it comes to traversal and combat. Combat is relatively simple and rewarding, Rayne has a series of close-range blade combo attacks and a powerful magnum with limited ammunition. Life is restored by draining the blood out of lesser vampire enemies, a neat mechanic that allows you to stay topped off as long as some weak fodder enemies are available. A basic rule of thumb is any humanoid looking enemy can be drained, as well as the flying giant mosquito enemies. You can even bite enemies to turn them into living bombs, which is something that really never got old, even if the explosion doesn't do as much damage as I'd have liked.
Unfortunately, the smooth graphics and simple but initially rewarding combat are not enough to compensate for a brutally flawed title. While there can be an expectation that these games can be very difficult, Bloodrayne Betrayal gets downright punishing and frustrating. The animations are smooth, but you will often get stuck in the sometimes overlong animations while in combat, resulting in you getting hit while swinging at empty air, performing the totally wrong combo, or simply standing there. If you are so unfortunate to get hit and knocked down, it is likely that by the time you manage to stagger to your feet, you will get hit again before you can move. This is made even more frustrating by the inability to jump immediately after you stand up from a knockdown, because there are some animation frames that have to finish first. Other poor control mechanics result from poor design choices: to do a large jump you must be first running in the opposite direction you want to jump and then backflip. This is initially no problem, but later in the game you are tasked to do this rapidly 5-6 times in a row while standing on platforms that fall if you spend more than a second on them, barely giving you the time it takes to be 'running' the opposite way you want to go.
This game is HARD, but not in a fair way. Deaths in this game don't seem to come about because you made a mistake, but because the game didn't respond correctly. Getting locked in animation cycles and dying, or getting repeatedly knocked down until you die with NO way to respond are just some of them. The game likes to hide pits behind foreground objects that make it nearly impossible to see, and one battle that occurs entirely in silhouette on a black background makes it almost impossible to keep track of where Rayne is, and requires just dumping your magnum blindly and hoping you kill all the enemies before you run out of ammo. One of my favourite techniques for some of the more ridiculously combat scenarios is just hopping up and down on an enemy's head til he dies. It feels a bit lame, but it is a reliable way to get past some of the hardest combat encounters.
The game is typically relatively generous with checkpointing, but it has a tendency to be stingiest at the hardest points of the game. Several times I made it past one of the hardest sections of the last level in the game (a brutal gauntlet of the hardest enemies in the game) just to die to a silly pit I couldn't see and have to start the entire process over again.
This entry in the Bloodrayne franchise showed great promise, the art direction is superb and the basic premise of the game is relatively fun for the first few chapters. Unfortunately, the basic game mechanics and controls cannot keep up with the increase in difficulty that the developers were attempting to impart. In the end, the latter third of the game just ends up being an exercise in frustration, battling with the controls to perform intensely intricate platforming and combat manuevers that Rayne simply did not seem designed to handle.
