0.8 hours played
Written 12 days ago
avoid. absolutely unplayable, for several reasons related to the game itself, and some things this re-release should have fixed/addressed. the absolutely minimum amount of effort was put into this release. here's what i noticed, in no particular order:
1. just like bloodrayne 1's terminal cut, if you're one of the many many people running two monitors, this game does not constrain the mouse cursor to the window, often causing you to click out of the game when you attack. the first game has a mod to fix this on nexusmods, but for bloodrayne 2 you need to download an old janky program called Cursor Lock to fix it.
2. there are checkpoints mid-mission now which is a step up from the original, but if you need to stop playing, you will always start from the very beginning of a level. the levels are a lot smaller-feeling than the first game's, so i guess that mitigates it a bit.
3. often when you're climbing a pipe and want to jump to the next one, rayne will explicitly not jump to the one you're aimed at. she will quickly switch directions and then jump at random, often causing you to fall all the way down to ground level, negating all of your progress on the current acrobatic section. this happening repeatedly during a combat section made me alt+tab out of the game.
4. everything about the blood pistols: the blood pistols are called "very dangerous," but they take about half of your magazine to kill just one unarmed human fodder enemy. refilling the guns requires you to feed on multiple humans because the guns fill very slowly, which feels extremely not worth it for how weak the guns are. the animation for filling the guns has you briefly bite their neck first, then rayne seems to change her mind and then switch to filling the guns directly, exacerbating the whole process.
5. the cool automatic dual lock-on system from bloodrayne 1 and nocturne is gone, and in its place is a severely janky and unsatisfying target lock system. remember when bloodrayne could do cool acrobatic moves while shooting two different targets? not anymore! you instead have to lock on to one enemy to target them consistently with your guns, and your movement is slowed while locking on. it feels awful, and it still takes forever to kill one enemy.
6. like bloodrayne 1's terminal cut, the game is locked to a stuttery 30fps in in-engine cutscenes for no reason, and locked to 60fps in-game. i can live with 60fps, but i thought the point of a re-release for modern pcs was to, you know, achieve modern standards.
7. slashing human enemies with blades makes them react as if you just blew some air at them pretty hard. the same could be said of the first game, but every single hit in this game feels lame and underwhelming. the combat is either you stunlock them, or you get stunlocked.
8. just like bloodrayne 1, they have a few neat ideas for the story that aren't explored or justified or built out at all, making the entire thing feel like a rough draft of ideas rather than a story. it's 70 years after the first game, and rayne has been addressing something never once mentioned in the first game since the nazis were around. sons of her dad i guess, although she had a human surrogate father who was never mentioned before either. it's just a bunch of stuff happening one after the other with no cohesion. it's just identical corridors and click-spamming identical enemies.
still, if it weren't for the combat feeling completely weightless and way too spongey, i think i could see myself liking this at least as much if not slightly better than the original.
