It is very obvious that this game is trying to sell based on sexual appeal, violence and gore.
The game designers created a vampire lady whom they claimed is a “super sexy, super lethal and supernatural heroine who have the looks and moves to make gamers lusting for her”, as the main character.
Her job in this game is to tempt the hot-blooded male gamers and to cut her enemies into million pieces. Well, she is attractive to a certain extent but I do wish that the game designers did not try this tactic to sell this game instead. This kind of tactic just simply makes it seems like a desperate effort to appeal to the gamers and causing this game to sink into a lower class of games, which instead of attracting most of the gamers, will repel them away instead.
This is very unfortunate because actually, the core of this game; the gameplay is pretty good and enjoyable, though it does get repetitive. It is very similar to Soul Reaver in terms of gameplay with the addition of using fire-power and minus the soul sucking ability and the horrible precise platform jumping.
Graphics 6
This game is decently rendered but with many flaws.
The characters have quite detailed facial features but it is obvious that more work can be done to improve on this area because the jagged edges are still very obvious.
The character models are like nicely craved wooden dolls, they have nice profiles but lack the details and the life in them. While the Nazi soldiers are rendered pretty impressive especially their horrified expressions when Rayne is sucking their blood and some characters like Rayne, Mynce, the twins and Jurgen Wulf look distinctly different from each other, other enemies like the Nazi Officers and the vampires look muddled.
The movements of the characters are very realistic from the Nazi soldiers waving their hands in pain as Rayne sucks their blood, and running away in terror when Rayne just lops off their arms or slices their comrades into pieces to, the motions of Rayne when she attacks, rolls, jumps and flips. These movements can be seen clearly when Rayne uses her dilated perception to slow down time, so enjoy them.
Rayne herself though looks like she is suffering from “Stiff Back Syndrome” in which her back is rigidly straight and she looks like she cannot turn her waist. More work can be done on this area.
As for Rayne, she looks pretty good with her hair flowing very naturally in the air when she moves and the two ornaments on the sides of her hair not only enhance her look but also swirl around impressively and realistically adding to the viewing pleasure.
Her costume is nicely designed which is full of gothic flavor completed with intricate details. My main gripe with the design of Rayne is the inconsistency of her appearance in the CG movies and in-game graphics.
In the CG movie, Rayne has blood red hair and looks absolutely nasty, something like a femme fatale while her hair is orangey red and she looks milder in the game. I think that surely, it is not difficult to avoid this kind of discrepancy, how tough is it to ensure that the colour is the same and the basic facial features are the same?
The CG movies are quite good with pretty realistic expressions and movements of the characters but as I had said before, the design of Rayne could be improved on.
Also, as compared to the CG movies of Silent Hill games, yes, even first Silent Hill game on Psone, the CG movies of this game is still one notch below.
Then again, it is almost impossible to reach the standard of Silent Hill’s CG movies, so I am not going to complain too much.
The backgrounds are nicely detailed and the layout of the levels is realistically designed, yes, there are barracks and toilets in the Nazi hideouts. Rayne can make scratches on the walls when she slashes around and gallons of blood littered the floors and walls when some fighting takes place.
Gameplay 7
The gameplay lies heavily on action instead of puzzles. In fact, this game is something like a hack and slash platformer with a gothic theme, mixed with some easy puzzles. Most of the time, these missions will just require Rayne to kill her way through her enemies to get to her goal. This is where the fun of this game comes in, the dispatching of the enemies (though some players may feel uneasy about this, which is perfectly understandable since some enemies are human and they are killed in various cruel ways.)
Another thing about this game is that the player is strongly encouraged to create as much carnage as possible, meaning the player should try to use Raynes blades instead of gun since fire power is relatively useless in this game and it does not fill up the blood rage gauge.
And as you know, using the blades implies many severed body parts, blood fountains and tortured screams.
The puzzles are minimal in this game, which are mainly finding some batteries to power on the elevators, finding control turkeys to open the doors and figuring out where to go.
The finding errands are not very tedious, usually the items are not too far away from where you want to use them on and there are less than ten such puzzles in this game. Also, you can use the Aura sense or the radar on the right bottom corner of the screen to check which direction to go and find the items.
Figuring out where to go is the more difficult part of the game even though the aura sense and radar do provide some help. This provides some challenge to the game making it more interesting.
The controls are very responsive, there is no problems executing the moves you want.
The button configuration are excellently done in which you will have no problem manoeuvring about while using the blades or gun.
The camera always keeps some distance away from Rayne so it is easy to what is ahead of and besides her.
In addition, there is the strafing option, which is useful in the case of avoiding your enemies’ bullets or attacks and going behind them for attacking. The versatility of controls, in which you can choose between three different control setups and change the turning speed, is a welcomed feature to the game.
My problems with the controls? Well, they are the inability to control where to land when doing spinning jump and difficulty in judging where to jump so as to land onto the wires above to tightrope.
These two problems will cause Rayne to land in water many times, which is not a very pleasant experience as due to Vampire lore, they don't like the wet stuff.
Sound 7
The music on the title screen is nice and the background music of the levels has a strong gothic feel, nothing too irritating but nothing too memorable as well.
Also, the music is too soft, to the point of non-existent.
The sound effects on the other hand are wonderfully done from realistic gun firing sounds, slashing sounds of Rayne’s blades, screams of agony of the characters (can be pretty disturbing though), Nazi Officers and soldiers to sounds of the explosions.
The voice acting is decent, especially by Laura Bailey who voices Rayne
but take note that the characters are very generous in the use of vulgar language.
Story 4
Rayne, the heroine of this game is a half human, half vampire who has all the strengths of a vampire with none of its weaknesses, she is the product of the rape of her mother by her vampire father. Thus, she created a path of destruction, killing many vampires in order to find her father.
During the search for her father, she was recruited by the Brimstone society to help eliminate any supernatural threats that will destroy the world. So she was sent to Louisiana on a mission and the game begins from here.
Frankly speaking, the story here is very generic because there are no twists, no details, no emotional scenes and superb ending. The story is very predictable; Rayne discovered the evils works of Nazis and seek to impede them from creating more chaos, there are no surprises in the progress of the story except for one minor one regarding a mysterious commander.
Also, there are not many details and information added to the story, like the exact evil deeds of the Nazi Officers that Rayne is sent to kill, what and where exactly is Brimstone society, why the Brimstone society chose Rayne to be their agent, how they convinced her to join them and information on her father. T
here are too many questions unanswered and the lack of details makes it difficult to be engross into the story. Also, it is hard to feel for the characters because no emotional scenes are depicted in this game.
Despite the weak story, the game designers should be given credit for coming up with a logical story to function the progress of the game.
For one thing, Rayne is purposely designed to be a half vampire instead of a pure one so that she has no constant need to suck blood, she only need to do that to replenish her health when she takes damage. This will prevent the game from becoming irritating as you do not have to constantly look for targets to suck blood on, just imagine you are desperately looking for a target to fill up your life bar and there is no one alive in sight and the life bar is slowly draining, well, you get the idea.
Also, this adds humanity to Rayne’s character in which though she kills in very cruel fashion, she do not kill innocents just to satisfy her blood-lust, she only kills the evils, so it is easier to like this character, though it is hard to feel for this character. Also, the story gives reasons for Rayne to venture onto various areas of the game to complete her missions, so I can say that the story does fulfil its basic functions.
Overall 7
This game has decent gameplay, worth a try, great for gamers who love action in their games.
It's a nice concept that at times works but at others, sometimes feels poorly executed.
Still, it's a game worth trying just for the introduction to Rayne herself, an amazing character that shouldn't really work... And she only gets better with the games sequel, BloodRayne 2 and hopefully that is expanded upon further with this summers new game BloodRayne: Betrayal.
No comments:
Post a Comment