[Don't give this game (or this review) to your kids.] BloodRayne is about killing bad guys just because they're bad guys, stealing their guns and sucking them off (of their blood). The power fantasy of a half-vampire is really well done, Rayne controls as well as she looks - the controls are responsive (too responsive?) and the game doesn't shame you for picking Easy if you prefer to run into bullets rather than dodge them. There are various mechanics to spice up the gameplay formula, but they are janky at times so thankfully using them isn't a hard requirement. The voice acting of this game is beyond stellar - it's the best in any game I've played, bar none. As you can picture from the cover art, this game is unapolegetically sensual. Most games hold back - they may use provocative character models, but usually something else falls short: either the game takes itself too seriously, the voice acting sounds like a normal person, or the game itself is frustrating to play. Rayne's VA always has a "dommy mommy" sexual undertone, be it in dialogue or gameplay. She has lots of quips during fights, and the sounds she makes when getting hurt are... entertaining, to say the least. And then there's jumping, which will remind you of Quake. For some unfathomable reason, the sequels don't retain this aspect... If that's not what you look for in a game, admittedly it does fall short in some aspects; certain aspects of movement feel inflexible (ex: the landing roll animation), gun pickups are hard to see, no in-level checkpoints, no option to turn off just Rayne's voice if you find it distracting, and lack of essential cheats like infinite ammo (seriously, they don't let you use the shotguns enough). Personally, no other game comes close to the experience this game gives so I'm going to be biased and give it a 5/5 anyway. P/S:The Terminal Cut re-release contains the Japanese dub (there is a English sub mod somewhere), and as of writing, the censorship issues are fixed.
Having played Harvest Moon and some Rune Factory, both being farming type games, there's really a lot of similarities. Unfortunately these include the sun that moves at apocalyptic speeds, which is a shame because Stardew Valley has an amazingly calm vibe that makes it fun to turn auto-run off and walk slowly along the map, maybe go fishing, or get engrossed in the mines, wandering about and slaying enemies that don't like you doing that (btw, combat is barebones - not something to buy the game for) - all good things I love doing when I just want to relax my nerves. Given that by default 10 minutes pass in-game every 7 real life seconds, there's very little time to enjoy any of these without worrying about getting in bed by in-game 2AM! So I use these mods: SMAPI (of course) by Pathoschild, Timespeed by cantorsdust and Save Anywhere by Alpha_Omegasis (because after installing Timespeed and configuring it I ran into the problem of not being able to save when I want to quit without skipping to the next day). After editing the config file of the respective mods, it becomes the game I'm talking about right now. There's still the main quests, like meeting the Wizard, but those can just be delayed forever as long I avoid his house, which is good. The way I'm playing the game leaves a lot of opportunities to eventually get bored, which tells me I've taken enough of the game inside me to relax, recover and get back to doing whatever I wasn't. Kinda what a game is supposed to be, sometimes. It's not always good to have incentives to play too much. To close this one, I'm not sure if anyone on video sharing sites plays it the same way as I describe here. so it's probably not helping your buying decision. Best you can do is take a normal gameplay vid, then think about doing all of the things in a much slower way. but that still might not help...
