Remember Underworld? It really managed to capture a specific sense of style that permeated the early to mid-2000s. It had Kate Beckinsale in all black, gothic structures and brooding atmosphere, deep blues and greys in every scene, and, of course, the allure of supernatural creatures long before the romanticism of them would go out of style throughout the 2010s. Call it a byproduct of other cultural touchstones like The Matrix, or maybe a consequence of the emotional downturn that the United States experienced after a particular tragedy in 2001, but there was a very brief period of time when you’d find a similar mix of vampires and action in comics, movies, television shows, and other pop culture outlets — including video games.
Developer Terminal Reality brought their sultry specter to the table with BloodRayne, originally debuting in 2002. Combining the appeal of pulp storytelling with a pale vampire lady in red and black leather, BloodRayne tells the story of the titular Rayne — a half-vampire working with the elusive Brimstone Society — as she attempts to take down strange supernatural threats before they take over the world. However, seeing as how the game takes place in the 1930s, it doesn’t take long before the growing presence of the Nazis snakes its way into her war against evil. It was a crude game for the time. Though, what it lacked in overall polish, it made up for with plenty of simple action, an entertaining lead performance by Laura Bailey, and oodles of seductive bloodshed that somehow came out on the Nintendo GameCube, of all things.
Modest sales and positive reviews all but guaranteed a sequel, and within only two short years, BloodRayne 2 would hit store shelves in 2004 and 2005 for consoles and PC, respectively. Spoilers: Things have changed pretty substantially. A huge time skip, revamped gameplay, new threats to face, and an overall shift towards traditional action combat instead of third-person shooting made for a sequel that significantly improved upon the original experience — and occasionally made it much worse.
But how? And why? Knowing that both games were given a fresh coat of paint via both Terminal Reality and Ziggurat Interactive in 2020, we have to ask: Is BloodRayne 2 worth giving a shot with so many other options available? And what does it exactly bring to the table to make it so compelling?
Bloody Rayne Rains Down
BloodRayne 2 jumps forward nearly a full century from the 1930s to a then-contemporary setting, though Rayne doesn’t look a day over 25. Being a dhampir does wonders for aging, after all. Now traveling the globe with Severin, her source of intel, she’s now tasked with hunting down the children of the malevolent Kagan — her own nefarious father, who presumably died back in the 1930s — as they’ve banded together to form the Cult of Kagan. The original plan was to systematically take them down one by one, but it quickly became apparent that a sinister plan of theirs had already been set into motion. What is it? How does it involve Kagan? And can Rayne ultimately stop it before it’s too late? Kind of.
It’s nothing really all that in-depth. It’s more just a vehicle to get Rayne from place to place, albeit in a way that feels more natural than the previous game. Whereas prior, you spent a decent portion of the beginning in the swamps of Louisiana before starting a globetrotting adventure across Argentina and Germany, you now spend a total of one mission at a semi-isolated mansion before venturing out into a sprawling city, with each location somewhat logically connecting to each other. A meatpacking district leads to a train yard, which leads to a water treatment plant, which leads to a factory, and so on. It’s not as exotic as before, but it helps keep that contemporary setting that the sequel is going for in check. Rayne herself hasn’t really seen much of a change either, barring a slight graphical facelift. Laura Bailey is as cold and crass as ever, and despite some glaring inconsistencies in the game’s subtitles, she’s a cruel delight.
The music isn’t all that much to talk about either. Most tracks fall into the category of moody ambience that occasionally dips into operatic singing or electronic hisses, with some faster-paced action tracks kicking in whenever there are things to cut up. Composer Kyle Richards returned after originally composing BloodRayne and Terminal Reality’s Nocturne, and they would eventually go on to work on prominent titles like Ghost of Tsushima after sticking around for most of Terminal Reality’s existence. They even provided some original compositions for the cult classic Ghostbusters: The Video Game.
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What has changed fairly significantly is the game’s approach to… well, gameplay. Instead of Rayne jumping all around and shooting things up with a bevy of handguns and long guns, she’s now restricted to nothing more than her iconic (if impractical) arm blades and a pair of Carpathian Dragons — a set of legendary pistols that use blood as an ammunition source in lieu of traditional munitions. It sounds cool for sure, but it just means that Rayne uses the same pair of guns for all the typical weapon archetypes you’ll find in similar games. Pistols, shotguns, explosives, the Carpathian Dragons do it all.
Combined with this is a substantial revamp of the harpoon from the previous game. While it was previously just a means to secure yourself a body to feed on, the harpoon has taken on new life as one of your most vicious and effective tools — whenever it works right, that is. Simply target an enemy, snag them with the harpoon, and fling them in any direction you want to make some space, disarm them, or throw them into some kind of hazard that’ll immediately dispatch them. You’ll be doing the latter a lot. Not by choice, either.
BloodRayne 2 really likes to show off whatever carnage it can. You and your harpoon will be flinging thugs and vampires alike off of rooftops, into industrial machinery, onto exposed rebar and spikes, through walls and fire pits, and into spinning blades more often than not, almost to a point where it almost becomes exhausting. Knowing that these types of kills are the only way to increase your maximum health and rage only incentivizes you to prioritize these further, even though their grotesque appeal does eventually dull itself down into an annoyance. Anytime there’s a piece of machinery or an otherwise inaccessible area that’s blocking Rayne’s path, it’s a coin toss as to whether or not you just have to fight some guys or fling them into something until it blows up.
Rayne has acrobatics now, too. The previous game saw her with a gob-smacking vertical leap that would put most basketball players to shame, along with this weird, drill-like forward jump that was used to bust down doors or gain some extra distance. It was bizarre, to say the least. Now, she can climb on poles and chain-link fences a la Prince of Persia, with the occasional rail grinding and platforming challenges to take advantage of this. It’s far from natural — her graceful movements on every obstacle contrast against some pretty stiff inputs — but it does add some occasional variety between brawls.
You do have some more tricks of the trade to play with at least. Vampire powers are unlocked as you progress through the story, some being from the previous game, and they all use Rayne’s rage as a source of fuel. If you have rage, you can activate a vampire power. Slowing down time, speeding up time, unleashing a powerful state that makes you invulnerable to damage, and controlling a thrall via a spectral version of Rayne are all useful in a general sense, but you’ll gradually pivot to a handful of staples throughout. Blood Rage and Ghost Feed were the ones I used the most, and I occasionally got some use out of Dilated Perception and Super Speed whenever I had to make some space. Aura Vision is also fairly useful for finding hidden Vampire Doors that refill your health and rage, on top of seeing how much health any nearby enemy has.
How do you get rage? Just fight things. Your regular attacks all build rage, and the most economical way of acquiring it also ties into the thing you’ll be doing most after harpooning things and slashing things: feeding.
Fiends Are Food, Not Friends
Admittedly, this is where things start to fall apart for me. I’m not an action game aficionado, but I’d like to think I have a basic understanding of how to make that kind of gameplay fun or interesting. Or challenging.
Rayne is a vampire, so it’s only natural to feast on blood to get your health back. Simply press a button, and Rayne will leap onto her nearest foe and drain them until they die. Sure, you can just wait for their blood to run out, but you can also prematurely finish them off with a variety of gruesome attacks, with several variants available for feeding from the front or from behind. It’s all good fun, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t get a huge kick out of them. But this presents an issue.
Feeding on someone effectively guarantees their death. Barring a few specific times, your feeding cannot be interrupted — any damage taken will be absorbed by your prey or by yourself mid-feeding, and unless your foe is carrying a big stick or a similar implement, they can’t really do anything to stop you. Likewise, using your finishing maneuvers nets you a large amount of rage, even more so than by just fighting enemies normally.
With how surprisingly fragile Rayne is, a lot of fights will often devolve to just using whatever environmental hazards are nearby, feeding on every other foe you find, and occasionally whipping out your melee attacks whenever neither one of the other two options works out. A particular enemy type introduced late in the game feels like the only non-boss foe that actively resists all of your means of instantly deleting whatever comes your way, and only a short time after they’re introduced, they practically disappear. It all becomes really repetitive after a while, even though the game itself isn’t that long to begin with.
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There are other issues, too. The Carpathian Dragons being powered by blood is an excellent idea — on paper. Compared to everything else you have up until the game’s last few missions, they’re more like pea shooters than anything else, and the only way to reload their blood supply up is to devote an entire feeding session to filling them up. Mind you, you can still use these guns when they’re out of ammo. They’ll just use up your own health instead. Outside of one boss, one particular enemy type, and my own boredom, I never really found much use for the Dragons.
You’d think that Rayne’s arm blades would be her only melee weapon, but no — she’s graduated to using all four limbs here, with her arm blades and her kicks now making up a combo system that really doesn’t justify its own existence. You can mash the blade button and the kick button for a simple combo, but the two never really meaningfully intersect in a way that makes their mutual existence worth it. The only variations you get in your attacks come from locking onto a target or not, and even then, you’re not going to be shaking things up all that often. More often than not, I actually found the kicks to be more universally useful than the second thing people think of when they think of Rayne. They more reliably interrupt enemy attacks, they knock enemies back for some breathing room, and while I can’t prove it empirically, I swear that they actually do more damage. Sure, the arm blades can occasionally slice off an arm or bisect a foe out of the blue, but that won’t help you when you’re fighting a boss.
Speaking of bosses: they’re all bad. I don’t believe in being overtly negative for the sake of being negative, but I really don’t have anything nice to say here. They either blatantly copy Rayne’s move set while erratically starting and stopping their own drawn-out combo strings, or they’re hulking beasts that can be brought down by just kicking them in the shins from behind until they die. It’s even quicker when you turn on Blood Rage, which I unabashedly used to just power through anything with its own devoted health bar.
You’d think these would only be reserved for bosses, but they even pop up on regular enemies throughout the game’s absolute lowest point: Twisted Park. All of a sudden, you’re thrown into the mix with multiple minibosses at once, enemies that cannot be disarmed or fed upon without some obnoxious positioning, and a brand-new foe that can only be dispatched with a particular shot from the Carpathian Dragons. Mind you, this level starts immediately after a prolonged boss battle, meaning that you’re starting out with what’s likely a reduced health and rage pool to boot.
It’s all just so obnoxious sometimes, especially when the game starts bugging out. One boss in particular demanded that explosives be thrown at it to defeat it, yet the singular enemy type that can accomplish this refused to spawn. This happened three separate times in a row until I seemingly got it to work properly. Other bosses got caught in a running loop against a knee-high piece of debris, or otherwise got caught in an exploitable scenario that made the ensuing fight a total non-starter.
Should You Play BloodRayne 2?
BloodRayne as a whole is a particularly intriguing oddity to me. The first game in the series really isn’t anything special, but there’s this strange mix of novel ideas, a genuinely perturbing atmosphere made up of supernatural horrors and comically evil Nazis, and even an equally scantily-clad Nazi doctor who mirrors Rayne’s own arm blades with surgical tools that really made it stick out in my mind.
It’s not as if BloodRayne 2 is completely devoid of anything positive. The graphical overhaul is appreciated, and the gory carnage you can unleash is definitely fun for a time. But it feels like the additional budget and scope made the end product feel more ambitious but less refined. For every upside, there’s this strange change that I feel ultimately brings the experience down. There are more vampire creatures here, but they all feel ripped from other, probably better games, while strangely clashing with each other aesthetically. The improved gore is appealing, sure, but a basic formula that worked before has been turned into this overtuned thing that doesn’t really function the way it should. Even the setting, while appropriate for the kind of era that BloodRayne 2 was released in, feels like a step backward from what came before. Oh goody gumdrops, a dilapidated water treatment facility and factory, that’s way cooler than a Nazi bunker and a castle decked out with military equipment.
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I am ultimately glad I took the time to finish BloodRayne 2, though, if not partially out of curiosity. I originally came close to finishing the game back when I was a teenager, but something compelled me to stop after I hit Twisted Park for the first time. Suffice it to say, I now remember why.
Is BloodRayne 2 worth playing today, ultimately? For me, it’s a hard thing to recommend. I can count the number of “attractive gothic woman killing monsters” games that tackle said premise much more consistently on two hands, with just about every Bayonetta game falling into that category. As a time capsule, though, you’ll have a bit of fun with the game’s vout-of-pocket carnage. Laura Bailey, of course, is a delight, and there are even some rewards for successfully completing a playthrough. A bevy of concept art, costumes, and more becomes available, along with quite a few different cheat codes to play around with.
Would I recommend you go out of your way to play BloodRayne 2? Probably not. Still, if the appeal of this pulpy, bloodstained series is enough to draw you in, there are at least a few hours of visceral thrills to be had.
BloodRayne 2 is thankfully playable on modern systems via BloodRayne 2: Terminal Cut, which is available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, GOG, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.
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