Edited on: October 10, 2025
Posted on: October 7, 2025
DudeWilson
Jeux: Avis: 4
Chaotic fun, but not without some issues
Note: I bought the Terminal Cut bundle on GOG which includes both BloodRayne 1 and 2. BloodRayne is something of an anomaly—in terms of sheer concept it's an absolute winner on every level: a sexy, half-vampire monster hunter who fights occult-obsessed forces of The Third Reich during the 1930s. In terms of theme, it ticks nearly every box of what I'm looking for and its very success as a franchise is likely based on the overwhelming strength of its concept alone. By the time of BloodRayne's release in 2002 we already had two Blade films, the Legacy of Kain series was going strong, and interest in vampires in media was at an all-time high. No doubt in large part due to the immense success of shows like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. The cultural impact of 1999's The Matrix was also well underway, with the runaway success of bullet time beginning to find its way into video games. And The Third Reich as enemies? Well, let me tell you a little something about The Third Reich: these guys are easily the most lovably hateable antagonists in any type of media franchise, and they're even more lovably hateable when said media heavily leans into their purported obsession with the supernatural and the occult and then lavishes them with a thick coat of cartoonishly evil paint. Hell, the entire Indiana Jones franchise was pretty much carried by how great they were as villains for the first and third films of that series and the lasting cultural impact of these films would continue to cascade through the collective public consciousness for decades to come. BloodRayne literally had it all. To take it one step further, BloodRayne was carried by its enigmatic and seductive protagonist, Rayne, clad in red and black skintight leather and lacking none for sass, equipped with two deadly blades, myriad vampiric super powers, and all the guns of her slain enemies at her fingertips to continue the carnage as long as even one enemy was left standing. BloodRayne gives you the power to create a symphony of carnage and destruction, leaving nothing but the scattered remnants of Rayne's enemies' dismembered corpses in her wake, and it's oh so sweet. For all its cathartic glory, BloodRayne suffers from some serious issues. First, the remaster is basic at best; it doesn't have great controller support built into it and if you are using anything other than a standard x-input controller you are going to need to use third party software. The game uses generic button names in the options and doesn't support proper controller glyphs outside of the odd Xbox button prompt that appears during gameplay. This remaster is a bit bare-bones and rough around the edges, but it does its job in providing a light facelift to a cult classic. Rayne gains a variety of special vampiric powers over the course of the game and these are activated as well as disabled with the d-pad. Activating these abilities during combat can feel somewhat awkward on a controller, as you're forced to take your left thumb away from the analog stick, less you awkwardly reach over with your right thumb. Neither approach is ideal. This issue is moot if you play with keyboard and mouse, and I can say that the game actually plays quite well with that control scheme. The default controls for BloodRayne on controller are a bit awkward in general, and it took me a lot of experimenting to get something that felt natural. I eventually found the most success by using the default controls for BloodRayne 2 as a starting point and making the odd adjustment from there based on personal preference. The game is split into three main acts. You'll spend the first part of the game fighting monsters while helping any remaining surviving villagers as you hunt down the source of an infestation. The second act introduces soldiers of The Third Reich as primary antagonists and offers a fairly large shake-up in terms of gameplay, giving you a hit list as well as some freedom as to which order to progress through semi-open levels. This freedom is nice but it also results in some backtracking and the occasional confusion as you may get lost or find yourself unsure of as to how to proceed. This act changes dramatically about halfway through, introducing a new enemy type which isn't as fun to fight. They overstay their welcome a bit and by the end of the second part I was glad to be rid of them. Thankfully they don't return for the third. The final act of BloodRayne is more or less a combination of the first and second parts, featuring the more linear level progression of the first half but maintaining the hit list aspect of the second, while retaining soldiers of The Third Reich as primary enemies until the end of the game. When BloodRayne hits its stride it's a ton of fun. Rayne is equipped with a variety of abilities that make leaping and dodging your way around the levels exciting. There's an excellent use of verticality in the level design that makes great use of Rayne's ability to jump and travel great distances through the air. Rayne has a spear she can use to latch onto enemies which never gets old, and every gun strewn about the environment can be incorporated into Rayne's arsenal in a use it and lose it kind of manner where she'll toss it as soon as the clip is empty. Rayne can similarly slow down time and there are no limits to its use; it's especially useful during some of the trickier boss fights. There's some seriously awkward platforming at times and an absolutely useless sniper ability you're forced to use at least once. Boss fights are a bit of a mixed bag in BloodRayne. For the most part they provide a nice change of pace from normal enemy encounters, but since you can only heal by feeding on enemies you can sometimes end up in awkward situations where you have no health, and sometimes enemies can gang up on you in such a way where it feels like your health bar disintegrates nearly instantaneously. This wouldn't be a big deal if death wasn't so frustrating. Dying at any point in a stage sends you right back to the start of the level. A fairly punishing and old school design decision, and you can sometimes die to some very janky, ridiculous, and unpredictable situations such as a random explosion which can be incredibly frustrating and kills all of your fun instantly. The final boss in particular is terribly designed, feeling like a culmination of every bad game design decision to artificially inflate difficulty. There are two enemies you have to deal with simultaneously, although they are hostile to one another as well, but you have finite ammo in this stage and one boss is immune to your blades. If you don't hit his weakpoint well enough and run out of ammunition you're forced to restart. To make matters worse, there's pretty much no way to heal during the entirety of the fight, you're on a limited timer where you'll automatically game over if you don't defeat one of them quickly enough, and the other of the two bosses is an absolutely ridiculous damage sponge who isn't particularly difficult to defeat but he runs around like a chimpanzee on crack and bringing him down feels like an unnecessarily drawn out war of attrition. I ended up using a few of the in-game cheats to get through this fight as nothing about it got even close to resembling a fun challenge; it was just annoying and tedious and a disappointing way to end a fun game. BloodRayne is sort of like your favourite pizza with one bad topping that you don't like. You can pick that topping off but its flavour has already cooked into and permeates the entirety of the pizza that sometimes you get a bite that just ruins an otherwise great tasting pizza. If you can tolerate some janky gameplay with questionable game design choices at times, you'll find a fun and chaotic third person action-shooter hybrid that mostly succeeds on the strength of its winning concept and themes. I had fun, and I hope we'll see Rayne again someday; she deserves a comeback.
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