The Haunted Hoard: BloodRayne 2: ReVamped (PS4)

The first BloodRayne title felt like it tried to include everything its creators could think of. At one part you’re carving your way through monsters in a Louisiana swamp and another you’re shooting your way through a Nazi castle before hopping into a walking mech for a single section. Pursuing such a range of ideas ultimately lead to the game forgetting the half-vampire Rayne’s motivation was meant to be she was looking for vampire father. BloodRayne 2 though aimed to hone the hack and slash action as the game’s main focus and turn her attention back to her personal quest, and with a leap in graphical quality to boot, it definitely feels like the cleaner experience if perhaps a little less fascinating than the old approach of throwing every idea at the wall. The PS4 remake, BloodRayne 2: ReVamped, even manages to be an improvement over the simultaneously released remake of the original, it shaking off the many game crashes that threatened Bloodrayne: ReVamped‘s playability.

 

One immediately apparent improvement in BloodRayne 2: ReVamped is in how it treats its lead. Rayne is now back on track to her goal of tracking down and killing her vampire father Kagan, but once he seemingly dies at the start, she shifts her work to instead wiping out all of Kagan’s offspring. Aiding her in this endeavor is Severin, and with him working as her advisor, Rayne now has someone to bounce her attitude off of. Severin is a proper gentlemen who is clearly exasperated with Rayne’s impulsiveness and brazen lack of decor, and by having someone to talk to, you can actually get a feel for who Rayne is outside of a few defiant gestures and the taunts she throws at enemies. She doesn’t have much depth but she feels like something more than an avatar for carving up vampires this time around.

Rayne’s efforts to wipe out her extended family at first will carry her through a lot of similar spaces, warehouse interiors or city streets and the like, but as you get deeper into the game and the stakes rise, BloodRayne 2: ReVamped really starts to put together some spaces that stand out. The most compelling like the zoo under siege are unfortunately far in the back, but it makes unique spaces out of a reptile house and aquarium that add some extra pizzazz before you head elsewhere for more plot relevant settings. Before then though, you can find yourself in intriguing spaces like a constant climb upwards through a machine, it not quite visually splendid but that gradual ascent does give a sense of progression greater than most spaces. Some ideas like having areas outside during the day also encourage you to find shadows to avoid burning up, and Rayne is actually able to engage with the environment quite a bit through this game’s combat system.

 

Rayne has devoted herself mostly to her arm blades for this adventure, the player inevitably left to rely on them to slice up most foes while they can sometimes throw in some kicks to break guards and disarm foes. You have a long range harpoon you can snag enemies with to toss them around, and this ends up a great way to control who’s attacking you and more importantly, it engages with the Carnage system. Almost every environment in BloodRayne 2: ReVamped at least has some debris with rebar sticking out off to the side so you can hurl enemies into an instant impalement, and depending on the location, the environmental kills can be much more creative. Shocking people by throwing them into speakers, slamming them down on the horns of decorative taxidermy, or flinging them into the spinning blades of a helicopter aren’t just ways to get a quick and easy kill, as enough Carnage will eventually lead to an instant refill of health and power. More importantly, those mentioned environmental kills are often required to create a way forward, and that does unfortunately take away some of the fun in using them. Standing in place, waiting for some goons to appear, and hurling them into a designated area is often a bit simple and slow, but generally the harpoon is an enjoyable addition to your battle options and one that can help in some of the tighter binds when many weapon wielding foes are in your way.

 

Rayne’s arm blades are her main means of attack, but not quite all you can use. You do get a gun, but rather than the firearms from the first game, BloodRayne 2: ReVamped uses special guns that run on blood and thus ammo is harder to come by. More importantly though, the guns feel for the most part unreliable. A boss here or there can be blasted more easily with one of the different firing options you slowly unlock, but other times you can fire repeatedly at a regular guy in front of you and it will seem like the shots are doing nothing. They have their points of necessity and it would feel inaccurate to call them ineffective, but they feel tacked on since even when they do work, your ammo capacity remains low throughout and while you can use your own blood for ammo, if you’re desperate enough to need to do that, you probably shouldn’t waste your health. Healing is usually not too hard to come by though, the player just needing to get in close to most enemies and press a button to start drinking their blood. Rayne can regain quite a bit of health from this and once a foe is in her grip for a feeding, they’re as good as dead. However, you can also cancel the feed to kill them for Rage power that goes towards your special abilities or you can drain them with your guns instead.

Rayne’s special abilities are pretty important to success, mainly because the game’s bosses often don’t mess around and can easily carve you to pieces if they get you in their grips. BloodRayne 2: ReVamped does have two areas weaker than its predecessor, one being sometimes Rayne takes a hit that can wipe out her whole health or inexplicably send her high into the sky in ways that don’t feel intentional, and the save points aren’t as common this time around. Checkpoints are still present enough that you will always be set back to a boss fight’s start and the game has a good sense for where it should place them despite not being as kind as the first game that offered a save every time you switched zones though, so when things do get tough in BloodRayne 2: ReVamped, you can still feel your way through them or overcome the little oddities. While there are a good deal of bosses you need to hurt in a certain way, others seem to rely on Dilated Perception or Blood Rage a fair bit. Dilated Perception is a penalty free way to slow the action down, meaning you can better dodge attacks and land your own against some of the game’s insanely fast swordsmen. Blood Rage on the other hand is a power boost with some brief invincibility to boot. The power you get from slaughtering enemies is drained during Blood Rage though and getting hurt actually pulls from that meter instead of your health, but if you’re fast and smart, some tough foes can be trivialized by an efficient Blood Rage. At the same time, actually slaughtering the goons to get that power while keeping your health high by feeding on others means it’s not always going to be a present option but a rewarding one if you hold onto the power for it, and as you beat boss characters, you start to unlock enhanced versions of these abilities that really are useful to have. Aura Vision, a way to usually see your objective or the state of nearby enemies, can get an upgrade where you send a ghostly copy of yourself to drain blood from a far off enemy for example, so while some things like the different ways to slaughter someone after you feed on them are mostly to show off the game’s bloody dismemberment system, there is a sense you are becoming a more capable fighter the deeper in you get.

 

Drinking blood, the harpoon, your time slow power, it all does make many battles feel a bit trivial when you can so easily overpower foes, and while the unique enemies can sometimes push you to actually figure out a unique way to kill a foe, it doesn’t completely dispel a growing stagnation in the action. Much like those moments where you’re hurling people onto environmental hazards to open the way forward, the fights can sometimes feel like weak roadblocks, but at least near the end more intelligent enemies who can often resist harpoon and feeding attempts from the front require more maneuvering to overcome. There is sadly little reason to explore an area since you’re mostly heading from destination to destination without any collectibles to uncover and the hidden Vampire Gates that offer full heals are rather unexciting, but at the same time there are plenty of destructible objects and thus a great deal of decor that can be fun to see get smashed up in the crossfire of some combat. There’s not much to see outside what lies ahead during a playthrough, but BloodRayne 2: ReVamped isn’t an empty world, it just keeps most of what’s included directly relevant to the forward path.

THE VERDICT: BloodRayne 2: ReVamped is more polished than its predecessor but falls into some of the same pitfalls. Regular enemies are easily invalidated with Rayne’s wide skillset and tougher battles can sometimes necessitate whipping out plain solutions like slowing down time. However, while there is definitely stagnation in the action, there are also moments you can indulge in some satisfying carnage or face a foe that requires a bit more thought and resource management. BloodRayne 2: ReVamped definitely gets more creative the deeper in you get, but even before then you have unique bosses propping things up so that this hack-and-slash doesn’t wear out its bloody charms too soon.

 

And so, I give BloodRayne 2: ReVamped for PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. BloodRayne 2: ReVamped is better than its predecessor but also maybe less interesting. The original BloodRayne tried to be so many different things that you wanted to see what direction it would head in next, but BloodRayne 2: ReVamped keeps some of that spirit of adventure restricted to the late game or the boss fights that do push beyond being fodder for Dilated Perception and Blood Rage. The carnage system was a smart way to keep you interested in the places you travel to though, Rayne doing plenty of pipe climbing and platforming that doesn’t really excite but seeing ways to quickly wipe out enemies with some new bit of environmental decor can spice up even an otherwise plain battlefield. Gun use does feel overly restricted, if they were cleaner to use and better implemented they could have livened up some of the monotonous fights, but when the game starts arming enemies more so they resist feeding attempts better, the battles at least require enough thought fights can find some new life. BloodRayne 2: ReVamped still leans too hard on Rayne’s special abilities though, if time slowing and super strength/invincibility weren’t options, than maybe battles could be better built to test your battle smarts.

 

BloodRayne 2: ReVamped does feel a bit like what the series should have been from the start, the game focusing on Rayne’s personal quest a lot more, the action revolves around her arm blades most of all, and she’s actually able to express herself thanks to having Severin around as a good contrast and a way to ground her a bit. However, by still holding onto some of the battle mechanics of its predecessor, it can’t keep the whole adventure even, the hack and slash action certainly stale at parts and mostly invigorated when the game strays from standard combat in some way. With everything else seemingly refined, it’s a shame that BloodRayne 2: ReVamped was still content to settle for so-so when it came to how the actual bloody action unfolded.