As you may have guessed from the title, I quite liked Bloodrayne 2. The fact that you play a redhead half-vampire in a fetish outfit who slashes up evil dudes and sucks blood while dryhumping and purring like a kitten while blood drips from the walls makes it abundantly clear that this game cannot be taken seriously. And why would anyone want to? There are nazi-vampires in it! On the technical side: the environs still look nice, if a bit blocky, because shader and reflection effects were already invented by 2004, the only thing that hasn't aged well are the models. Rayne's features are fixed like a boad and her breasts, always in focus, look frankly bizarre. The camera and controls are not very good but can be beaten into submission by try-and-error and time. Once subdued they work. So, if you are looking for a gothicy, funny game with lots of silly jokes, flesh and blood, check this out. If you like some depth in your games.. you are better off finding soul reaver.
When I got into gaming in my middle years of elementary school SHOGO was the short-lived king of shooters. More than 10 years later I finally got around to play it and... huh. There are hardware issues, which are irritating but the game is still playable and I don't dare to guess if that is GOGs or my fault. Doesn't matter that much really. Still, it does *not* run smoothly for me, the first game bought here to do so. Gameplay wise.. the thought that this was the big enemy of the first Half-Life title is a joke in retrospect. You can see that they had very similar ideas, lots of talking in game with NPCs, lots of environment changes without loading screens and more of a story than, say, DOOM. And they really succeeded. It is just that Half-Life did it much better. The story is kind of silly, the dialouge is a tad awkward, the characters are all pretty flat but.. really, this was one of the firts attempts to bake a story into shooty gameplay and they did it. You walk around either inside a giant robot and shoot other giant robots and anything else that fires and you, or walk around the ground as yourself and.. shoot anything that fires at you. That all works, but what breaks the experience for me is that the two different perspectives do not feel significantly different. The weapons change and I do a lot more damage in my mecha, but that really is about it.. but maybe that was the technology limit. SHOGO is not a bad game. If nothing else it is an interesting look on how FPS got going after Quake and Doom set it walking... but I just prefer other shooters more. 3 stars for a good, if lacking experience. And the fact I can rampage around in a robot. We don't that often enough anymore.
