Tuesday, August 26, 2014

BloodRayne

I bought quite a few games off GOG's and Steam's summer sales this year. Mostly RPGs, and from GOG if I had to choose between the two stores -- mainly because I like to buy games in USD. Aside from having higher prices for EU, Steam is not too bad, though. However, once GOG gets their client out -- which will hopefully include screenshot and played time features -- there is no question which distributor I will always prefer.

I also made couple impulse purchases. Hardly expensive ones but still games that I could have probably survived without. One of them was BloodRayne, a third person hack'n'slash game, whose protagonist I was familiar with from Uwe Boll's dreadful movies.

Turns out the game s(the first one at least) are not that great either. It is quite hard to find anything good to say about it. The game is just incredibly boring. The gameplay is dull -- you gain only couple new moves and vision modes over the course of the game. And the attack moves outside bloodrage feel ineffective and in general do not make sense. At all. One does not simply jump and kick like that no matter how supernaturally strong.

To my surprise, you can cut enemies' limbs off, which was somewhat entertaining. At least when Rayne decided to actually use her odd blades instead of performing the various impossible spinning kicks. I found jumping on enemies necks to be often the most effective way of killing. The nazi officers in acts 1 and 2 will block your attempts but with the slow motion mode on, you can very easily run behind them and then jump on them when they break their block.

Voice acting is mediocre at best and music is always terrible. Surroundings are uninspiring, as one would expect from a 3D title released for the original Xbox and PS2 (and GameCube) in 2002. Rayne's outfit and looks are passable, although they could've given her different clothes for each act. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Breast physics they did include, though you can only admire them during cutscenes. The pre-rendered movies are pretty cool, too.

The final showdown seemed interesting at first, being a free for all with two enemies, but Wulf and Beliar stopped fighting with each other quickly, and I had to take the nazi guy down on my own. Meanwhile, Beliar had kept growing in size and going into melee did not seem to be very wise. Fortunately -- and oddly enough -- taking him down with the guns found on the second floor of the place was quick and easy.

BloodRayne in general was not too challenging on the medium difficulty. Although I did get stuck for a while in a room that starts filling with gas when you enter it. It took me many tries to realize there were no weak walls to break through, and that I had to use the grenade launcher to break the windows to get out. At least that happened right at the start of the level, which are the only places you can save in the game. The level before the final boss fight, the Minefield, was worse. While crossing the minefield itself was not that bad, trying to get over the following bridge without falling down was rather tricky with it getting destroyed by the thrown grenades. And starting the level from the start repeatedly was irritating to say the least.

Maybe somewhat unexpectedly, the game's default controls were reasonable and getting it to run in widescreen resolution only took a simple .ini edit. The fps was jumping all over the place, though -- going up to 999 according to Fraps -- and I had to cap it via the gpu control panel. After that it run at smooth 60.

I guess I will have to play the second game now as I bought it as well. Hopefully it is better than this one.


No comments:

Post a Comment