So glad that Gearbox didn't completely abandon this game and re-released the original version, even though they were unable to remaster it like the others. The story is a bit of a deviation from the other games but not an unwelcome one. Instead of battling with nefarious empires for the future of your race and fulfilling ancient prophecies, you'll go toe-to-toe with a mysterious (and hella creepy) alien organism inspired by creatures from movies like The Thing, or Alien. It's completely different in tone from what you would expect in a Homeworld game but the mystery surrounding the creature and the ability to play as an underdog caste of the Hiigaran society really adds to the depth of the storyline and expands the lore in a satisfying way. The biggest improvement over the original in terms of gameplay was the time compression. Back in the day it was a real godsend since you could finally skip those excruciating moments when you had to wait for resource collectors to finish their job before moving on to the next level. There are also other quality of life improvements, like the lack of fuel on small fighters or new, useful ships like the processor, which is way more useful than resource controller from the original. The biggest issue that I have with this game is that the scripting can sometimes get buggy and it makes some missions unnecessarily difficult. TL;DR - GREAT GAME! You should definitely grab it if you enjoyed the HW Remastered Collection - just squint your eyes a little and don't pay attention to the low res textures on ships. The backgrounds still look beautiful, even today.
First game was pretty unique in its gameplay since it controlled like a typical, early noughties third person shooter but was largely focused on frantic melee combat. Bloodrayne 2, however, is more of a traditional brawler, very reminiscent of games like Soul Reaver or Devil May Cry. It actually makes a lot of sense because the main character was practically desigend for this style of gameplay. The only problem is - the game is an atrocious, buggy mess. The most imporant aspect in brawler games are the controls and they are just fiddly and unresponsive here, not to mention that even the most basic enemies are able to stagger you and kick your entire health bar down within seconds if you're fighting more than two of them at a time (which is almost always). It just makes Rayne feel like a total pansy instead of this badass vampire killing machine. The lock-on system and blocking also suck because you can only block the attacks of the enemy that you're currently locked on and all the others are free to kick you in the ass, staggering you and breaking your guard anyway - it's just useless and annoying as all hell. The only thing you can really do is to cartwheel around the place like a maniac, hoping that no one will be able to land a punch. Then there's platforming, which takes some inspiration from games like Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, except here it's also broken. Let's disregard the hilariously bad animations and ram-rod stiff posture of Rayne when she slides down the railings, the most annoying thing about platforming is that it fails to register some of your commands or does the complete opposite of what you intended, even if you thought your jump was right on the money. It's hard to recommend this game even to die-hard fans of Rayne. It's just incredibly frustrating and not very fun so trust me, it's not worth the hassle.
Even though Bloodrayne has some annoying problems and the combat is rather chaotic, you just can't help but to feel that juvenile glee while ripping nazis to pieces and watching half-naked vampire chicks with jiggly boobies kicking the living crap out of each other. Those design choices are the sole reason why this game transcended its own mediocrity and became a cult classic. I'm also pretty sure that it produced a whole generation of men who had to cope with very confusing boners during their puberty. Unfortunately, the game is really dragged down by a ridiculous spike in difficulty during the final act, even on easy mode. The vampire enemies are able to take away a full bar of health in less than a second if they gang up on you and it's BS cuz all they seem to do is awkwardly rub against you like its a glitch. Speaking of glitches, there aren't that many but they are just infuriating. They can even prevent you from finishing a level unless you cheat. I don't remember those from back in the day, so my guess is that the game just spazzes out on modern systems. Finally, the saving system is garbage because it allows you to save only during level transitions and some of the levels are pretty long, full of difficult fights, and cheap ways of killing you right near the exit. You'd be hard pressed not to put your fist through the monitor during those moments.
I tried to give this game a chance many times over the years. Together with Aquanox 1 it was my very first purchase on GOG but I never really got past the first few missions. I'll be posting the same review for both games because they're extremely similar to each other, both in gameplay, as well as with how the single player campaign is constructed. The first thing that struck me about them is how much goddamned dialogue you have to sit through in between each mission. Sometimes it felt like it could go on for 10-15 minutes at a time, which is a huge issue if the missions themselves are extremely brief. It also wouldn't be such a hassle if it wasn't for the fact that the story isn't terribly interesting and the voice acting is just... bad. If you feel like you just want to click through all this yapping then playing the game feels all the more pointless, to be honest. And the missions? Well, they range from bland and formulaic to just tedious and confusing. As I mentioned, many of them are very short so the overall impression the game is giving me is utter boredom. When I fire up a shooter, I just wanna shoot stuff, and there's not much of that going on in this game, at least within the first few hours of the campaign. Finally, I'm just not feeling it when it comes to controls and combat. It doesn't really feel like you're steering a submarine, it's more like flying a spaceship and shooting other spaceships, except there's some plankton floating around instead of space dust. Rather disappointing. Overall, neither of these games were very satisfying to me and despite my best efforts, I just couldn't get into them.
