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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Finger-lickin' good, 19 Nov 2003
In a fit of pre-Half-Life-2 ennui PC Gamer panned this game, after consistently hyping it up for several months. But I feel that this was really quite unfair, and ought to redress the balance a little, because this is actually quite a playable and often very enjoyable title to own. Here's why.Bloodrayne is a third-person adventure game, involving blood (obviously), Nazis, guns and hand-to-hand action with the occult forces of darkness. A good start, then. You play the character of Rayne, a half-human, half-vampire being sometimes known as a dunpeal - which means that she has most of the benefits of a vamp (sucking life-force via blood, immortality, acute senses etc) while not being subject to the majority of weaknesses (that have had Christopher Lee consistently burnt to a heap of ashes by every other man wearing tweed). In short, Rayne is quite a character to play, with speed, agility and power that leaves Lara Croft sulking in the little leagues. As part of a secret organisation that faces the powers of the occult, Agent Bloodrayne is sent to prevent a Nazi plot that threatens to unleash a dreadful power across the world, and must eliminate every high-ranking Nazi involved in the project. This task sends her across several locations across the Third Reich, against increasing numbers of enemies and more deadly opponents. Even an immortal can't survive being literally cut to pieces by machine guns or blown apart by grenades, so a little caution might be prudent... Gameplay itself is fun. It's nothing particularly special, but it's quite satisfying every time Rayne sinks her teeth into a Nazi, or goes into a blood rage, or goes into bullet-time - it's been done before in games like Max Payne, but Rayne is frankly a lot more fun to play as. The only complaint is that she has to keep picking up and dropping guns from her fallen opponents. This is dumb, to be honest. What you'd really want to do is pick up unused clips from your enemies (no soldier ever went around without a spare magazine) and use them in your currently held weapons. No such luck here, it's a Neo-like case of "used it, dropped it, took another one out". While this means that you are primarily obliged to use hand to hand combat, which Rayne is admittedly superb at (with an increasingly powerful set of combo attacks as the game goes on), options are a nice thing to have and sometimes you really need a good rifle to take down those pesky snipers in hard-to-reach places. All in all, this is a fun game to play. It's nothing very innovative, but it's well presented. The gameplay is fine, the graphics are fine, the level design usually makes sense. It's a dark and moody piece of blood-letting third person fun, and deserves better credit for what it does well. And because of this I am giving Bloodrayne Four Stars.
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