It’s Halloween night, in the present – bah, in 2004 – and Rayne is infiltrating a party on the trail of a vampire named Dariel Zerenski, a member of the Cult of Kagan. The voice of his partner Severin confirms in his ear that Zerensky will be present that night, and that he has to hurry if they want to intercept him. Suddenly Rayne stops when she sees a portrait hanging on a wall, and begins to remember.
It’s 1939. After ruining the Nazis’ plans to summon the demon Beliar and steal its powers at the end of the previous game, Rayne returns to the Brimstone Society only to find it destroyed by her father, Kagan, a vampire who spends his time among other things. begetting scores of half-vampire children with human women, then slaying their families and raising them as his servants. After a brief father-daughter reunion, we return to the present where we discover that Rayne spent the past seventy years touring the world, systematically hunting down his brothers and sisters, waiting for the moment when his father will reveal himself again to end his life as well. Zerensky is one of these half brothers, and the next target.
Bloodrayne 2 It was originally released in 2004, just two years after the original game, and like that one it received a remaster from Ziggurat Interactive, working with some of the original developers at Terminal Reality. Disappointed by the quality of the port of the first delivery (whose review you can read here, if they didn’t already), I started BloodRayne 2 ReVamped Preparing for the worst
Fortunately, my fears were unfounded. Mostly, at least.
Reviewed version: PlayStation 4
“Press X to Start” says the first screen of the game, so I listen and press X. For a fraction of a second another screen appears that says “BloodRayne 2 Terminal Cut” -the name under which the PC version of the remaster was released- before successfully switching to the Ziggurat and Terminal Reality logos. I wouldn’t be leaving the most positive first impression.
Luckily from then on everything was basically smooth sailing, and I’m happy to report that both the performance and remastering work on 2 ReVamped are a good notch above the previous installment. It’s not free of glitches sadly, but at least the freezes and crashes that came so close to ruining that game for me were percent absent this time.
Bloodrayne 2 it abandons the Nazi / European aesthetic of the first game in favor of a nameless city, clearly based in some North American metropolis of the early 2000s, and the levels take place mostly in office buildings, industrial complexes, warehouses and various factories. In general, everything is much higher than the first installment at the graphic level, and both the levels and the character models received a considerable improvement, in addition to the lighting improvements introduced by the remaster, they also feel substantial this time. . Performance on PS4 feels a lot more stable too, holding 60fps pretty much the entire time without those annoying and inexplicable drops I mentioned in my previous review.
But more importantly, Bloodrayne 2 It is a much more fun game than the first one.
GAMEPLAY
The work that Terminal Reality did to solve almost all the problems of the Bloodrayne original with sequel. While the basic gameplay remains (beat em up 3D with third-person shooter elements), lots of small changes and additions make it much more interesting, expanding on what worked from the first installment and leaving out what didn’t.
For starters, melee combat doesn’t feel like total garbage, thanks to the variety of different moves and combos that we unlock throughout the game. It is no longer viable to spam the blood drinking skill like in the first game because not only is the enemy AI better, but enemies with melee weapons have to be disarmed first. It is also seen that at some point the devs discovered the lock on, thank God. It is still not a fantastic combat system, but it is a substantial improvement, and even with its jank share it is raised by a very well achieved gore and dismemberment system that still looks good in 2021 and should have been revolutionary almost eighteen years ago.
Rayne’s hook now allows us to launch enemies in different directions to impale them against sharp objects conveniently located in the levels, or to solve fairly basic but very fun environmental puzzles (for example, throwing enemies at a giant fan to damage it and be able to use it as door).
Bloodrayne 2 also discards the gruesome firearms system of the first installment, replacing it with the Carpathian Dragons: two pistols that work on blood and that we can reload by pressing R1 while drinking the blood of an enemy, and for which we will unlock different types of shots throughout history that basically function as different weapons and consume blood in different amounts as well.
Our range of powers was expanded as well. The rage mode not only has several levels of intensity, but now allows us to activate it at any time as long as we have a bar available. While we are in rage mode, enemy attacks do not interrupt our animations and do not harm us (they only consume rage bar), making it a much more useful tool when dealing with groups of enemies or saving HP in a tense situation.
Rayne’s special vision, which in the first game only showed us the next objective, has a new function in the sequel and allows us to find the vampire lairs, hidden doors in each level that transport us to a small secret area where our bars of Life and rage and our ammo are fully recharged, giving us an extra reason to use a previously superfluous mechanic.
The levels maintain the average duration of the previous game, although they are more linear and have less exploration, which they compensate with the aforementioned environmental puzzles and some sections of platform that although they are not as polished, they serve to give a little more variety to the games. moments of downtime. What they do: now luckily they have reasonable checkpoints and it is no longer necessary to start over with each kill.
BLOOD TIES
The story in Bloodrayne 2 He never makes it past the “entertaining garbage” bar, but boy is it good garbage. The writers were clearly much more comfortable writing this game and they managed to find the perfect pitch. Rayne is a much more developed character and her observations and one-liners are legitimately funny in the sequel, with Laura Bailey sounding much less boring and drab, especially in her interactions with Severin, her fellow Brimstone Society (with an unrecognizable Troy Baker , who also voices Kagan, on paper). Rayne’s half siblings are all a joy to hear too, as is Kagan himself. Good cheese, they say.
Unfortunately it is during the cutscenes where Bloodrayne 2 It also demonstrates most of its glitches, with moments where the subs don’t match what the characters are saying or directly cut off earlier, with the voice line ending in the middle of the subtitle. Almost as if they had written something but decided at the last minute to only use part of the line, leaving the subtitle as it was. Later, in the scenes before some bosses, the characters did not move their lips when speaking, making everything seem like a bizarre doll show. They also did not add subs to the pre-rendered FMVs, which added to some volume problems in the mix makes it difficult to understand the dialogue well at times.
But leaving these little glitches aside, BloodRayne 2: ReVamped It’s a much more robust and fun game than its predecessor, and I enjoyed it a lot more, too. It is quite strange that there is such a big difference in quality between both releases both between the games themselves and in the attention their remasters received, but where I felt the first game sabotaged my fun at every step, I have zero problems in recommending the sequel in its current state.