BloodRayne 2 - PS2

Released in 2003, BloodRayne followed the antics of an ambiguous anti-hero, Agent BloodRayne. Certainly at least partly human, she was endowed with various bloodthirsty vampire-like attributes, but her status as human-hungry undead freak didn’t mean she was a worse person than the Nazi baddies she was up against. Between you and us, she owed more than a little to the also red-haired, violent and vampire-heritaged Durham Red, a character from the British comic 2000AD’s famed Strontium Dogs strip.

The first game introduced Rayne as a ‘dhampir’, a half-human, half-vampire mongrel with the strength and longevity of a vampire but also the rather less convenient aversion to sunlight and thirst for human blood. The game was set in 1935, and her character benefited from the juxtaposition of the well-documented Nazi obsession and the occult. The most satisfying aspect of the game for many though, was the enormous amount of blood involved as Rayne carved her way through hordes of enemies with balletically violent grace, stopping only to recharge her energy, which she of course did by feasting on the blood of the vanquished.

BloodRayne 2 takes place 70 years later: amongst the benefits dhampirs receive from their supernatural relatives is near-immortality. Rayne seems to have spent most of the intervening time between this game and the last hunting down and destroying members of her family, who continue to venerate her late, deranged father through the Cult of Kagan. The contemporary setting also gives the game’s creators a chance to exercise their mildly plagiaristic tendencies, and this time it is Blade that they plunder: the game features a vampire plot to block out the sun and farm humans like the inferior cattle that they are, with a benevolent and powerful half-vampire the only person standing between the ignorant race and their destruction.

The blades Rayne wielded in the original make a comeback, and the combat experience is altered by the inclusion of customisable blood guns of some sort that the vampiress can fill up when she feasts off her enemy. Also widely used is a harpoon that disarms your enemies, leaving them harmless but not so battered that there is no good feeding on them. All in all then, more than enough new exciting features to keep the many fans of the original happy, and plenty to attract new users too. more