Bloodrayne 2 Review

Bloodrayne 2 screws up the gamefeel hard. My big issue with the game is that so much of the combat lacks any kind of weight. When you strike someone, it feels like are hitting the air and enemies react like you are splashing water at them. You can get stunlocked by bosses too. Enemies can strike you while you are attacking them and it makes combat feel like weird slapfights with swords. I haven't played a combat system feeling this weightless since Prototype 1. That and for fuck's sake why can't you feed enemies while they are down? The first game had this. The damage reactions enemies have to gun shots feel pitiful too. The lock on sucks and cycling through enemies is a gigantic pain since you need to make a claw grip on the controller just to actively cycle through them. The enemy variety isn't even as good as the first game since all you fight are generic thugs. The writing and voice acting is solid, at the same time the awful gamefeel ruins what fun I could be having, that and the platforming controls aren't very good either, I get it's hard to be precise while the movement is automated but the Prince of Persia Sands trilogy felt like I had more control. Another issue I have with the platforming and I can see why so many modern games had to make interactable ledges have specific colors is that it was kind of hard to tell what ledges and I can interact without the aura vision turned out so much of the platforming sections was spent with me having the aura vision filter on and the white filter can be pretty distracting much like the Detective Vision in Batman Arkham Asylum since the devs put their heart and soul in making the enviroments just to have the player see it with a filter effect. I don't even mind that this game is a full on melee brawler rather than 1/3 of one like the first game but it feels like Terminal Reality was making a full on melee brawler for the first time.

The puzzles aren't really all that interesting since it just feels like the game was chasing the trend of every action game in the early 00s needing to have a ragdoll physics engine of some kind, I say this because every puzzle in the game mainly revolves around pulling things with Rayne's harpoon, and the whole thing lacks any way to be precise. You just hope that the engine will pull enemies exactly to the spot you want it to. I can also talk about other stuff like the AI being really dumb, and the camera is also really terrible in that it often zooms super close even though you don't want that, this can happen with both platforming and combat. I only got as far into the game as I did because I used an invinciblity cheat and I am glad I did since some of the bosses in the game are some next level of cheap, most of the time you aren't even fighting the boss you are often fighting minions or doing some annoying puzzle instead of fighting the boss directly, the boss fight with Ferril is super grating because you have to take down a bunch of generators while getting chased endlessly. The boss with Ephemara revolves around destroying her power sources while you are getting chased again, and the penultimate boss with Xerx's requires you to hope the autoaim with the harpoon and and your guns can be reliable enough to consistently hit him. You also get way too many abilties that I never used all that much due to the game never making clear how to use them or encouraging me to use them in anyway. The most useful power I got was Blood Hammer and that was because it was an explosive weapon that did a lot of damage.

Positives is that that the blood and gore animations are decent, and the story actually had an overarching plot now with twists and turns and with actual villains for you to hate this time around, Rayne and Severin's interactions with each other are amusing enough and Rayne is even more snarky and has even more over the top one liners than she did in the first game, it does ignore the first game's story to the point where it almost feels like a soft reboot rather than a sequel but I don't really mind since the first game's story was rather weak to begin with. The cliffhanger ending seems to be rather typical of games in the early 00s where they tease sequels that never actually came out but what can you do. I really would've liked to see where the story have went after the cliffhanger.

Overall, while Bloodrayne 2 is an improvement is the writing and story, the gameplay I find weaker, a bad camera, terrible feedback for melee combat, lack of weight to melee attacks, weak bosses, game giving you too many abilties that it never really encourages you to use and plethora of other issues ruins what could've been a solid sequel.