6.2 hours played
Written 13 days ago
tldr: please remaster and re-release Nocturne!!! give it to Nightdive because this bloodrayne rerelease aint very good!!!!!!!!
bloodrayne is an intensely janky game, easily falling into the category of cult classic. the signposting for boss fights is awful (how was i supposed to know i was meant to attack the wooden supports in the hedrox fight? they dont look any different from the unbreakable textures, and they're not highlighted in any way), the combat is spammy and awkward, but hey, the blood and gore effects are charming
the idea is really cool, but done better in Nocturne - a shadowy cabal in the early 20th century cabal sends special task forces out to deal with various supernatural threats. unfortunately you never get to hang out in the cabal like nocturne, nor speak to anyone but for a couple times, so it's hard to feel connected. there's not a lot of plot, and what plot there is feels very truncated and unjustified. there's a whole big plot point where rayne is meant to know what Hedrox is, despite the game never ever mentioning Hedrox before, and they dont bother explaining whats going on to the player for a good while.
most of the game is just moving through mazes from objective to objective, and the mazes aren't very satisfying. put it this way: if bloodrayne didnt have a waypoint system, and often stop to show you a cutscene showing exactly what a switch did, it would be almost literally impossible to complete.
the ending is EXTREMELY abrupt, and surprising in a bad way. again, for the sheer amount of inventive ideas, different places to visit, and fun worldbuilding in Nocturne, it is really noticeable how few ideas bloodrayne has going on.
bloodrayne has some good ideas, but it is so incredibly bloated. there are two (2) main missions after the prologue, and the first full mission in argentina in particular is so long for no good reason, making you trudge through so many identical bunker hallways before anything actually interesting starts to happen when the daemites show up. and even then, it's more identical corridors. the last few maps in the daemite nest looked great, but are made frustrating by the sheer amount of hitscan enemies who take too long to kill:
nearly every enemy in bloodrayne is too spongey to basic melee and to anything but the largest guns, making the entire game feel like a cheesefest. i often had to just keep spamming e to feed one guy after another to survive. there can be a pretty large amount of enemies, which is great, but i feel like i should be hacking through them a lot faster.
rayne's presentation/performance in particular is often inconsistent. she has a lot more personality in the pre-rendered cutscenes than in-game - for example, she literally flips off each of the two final bosses after killing them, while in-game cutscenes most often just have her stand still and say very matter-of-fact things about the current mission. i don't particularly like or prefer either presentation, but it's very charming how inconsistent and scrappy the whole thing is. where nocturne would throw you different nuggets about how this strange world works every thirty seconds, rayne is laser-focused on the next target on her hitlist.
this re-release in particular has some issues - the game is locked to a stuttery 30fps in cutscenes for no reason, and locked to 60fps in-game. also, the only time you can save is at level loads, and some levels can be very very long. if you don't cheese certain encounters or cheat, you'll be replaying a LOT of the game very very often. boss fights are especially difficult because they often don't include a viable consistent way to heal during them. if there are any humanoid fodder enemies around, it is extremely difficult to feed off them without the boss catching up and cutting your healing short, often also taking off more health than you managed to gain. an optional manual quicksave function added to this rerelease would have been a godsend.
(i never understood the quicksave hate that some people have - quicksaving doesn't lessen challenge at all, it only keeps you from having to repeat anything that isn't the exact challenge you're currently working through. also, as a developer at id once said: you choose which buttons you press. just dont use quicksave if you dont like it and stop whining when people do use it)
the single biggest problem with this rerelease is that if you have more than one monitor, your mouse is not constrained to the game window, and you'll often minimize the game by clicking to attack. there is a mod on nexusmods that can fix this problem, but it's really bad to have this problem in a release of the game meant for modern PCs. bloodrayne 2's terminal cut doesn't constrain the mouse cursor either, but i unfortunately cannot find a mod for it.
if you're jonesing for a 2000s-era-as-heck experience with some 2000s-as-heck occasionally great music, you can have some fun with bloodrayne. it's immaturely horny, it's nonsensical and anachronistic and goth and occasionally cool and often unintentionally funny. but you do get to kill a lot of nazis. there are even nazis taken over by brain worms, which kinda resembles some literal people in the current united states government!
