|
|
|
Blood Rayne: slicing and dicing at its best?
Vampires hold a very important place in my heart. They were the hallmark of the western culture as the kind of villain one would root for. A breed of bad guys who were far cooler than the good ones.
Before its release, I had read a lot about Blood Rayne and was very excited over the boundaries it was trying to push in the stale third person shooter genre. It was going to be the perfect mix of Hollywood story lines with over the top action coupled with the most amazing special effects. The protagonist of the game is a half human half vampire, looking for her father. The story and the scenarios of the game will remind you a lot of the Hollywood flick, Blade. Like blade, the heroine is very angry at her vampire brethrens and is out for revenge in a rather violent manner. A secret organization hires her to do their dirty work against the ever-evil Nazis, and thus the story progresses on forth.
Rayne has managed to borrow the best of moves from every corner of the entertainment industry. She can climb on walls and do crescent flips ala Trinity in the Matrix. Plus she is able to hold her own with all forms of weaponry, using separate weapons for both hands to dish out rapid punishment to her enemies. She also has three special view modes that allow her to get an edge over her opposition. The first is called an “aural” view which allows Rayne to see through walls and detect enemies and objectives. This feature and an onscreen map allow the game to become far more accessible for the newer players. The second view mode is the ever popular “bullet time” that allows one to watch everything in slow motion and dodge bullets quite effectively. The before mentioned crescent flips allow for the cool matrix style bullet dodging. It is possible to flip in the air guns blazing, thus making Rayne a rather potent killing machine. The third view is the sniper scope style zoom mode. This allows Rayne to accurately pick off targets from a distance. There are other super human feats that Rayne can easily accomplish. She is able to jump tall buildings in a single bound (pun intended), do lethal spinning kicks in mid air, throw a harpoon like weapon at her enemies and much more. One of the most innovative features of this game is the way Rayne manages to keep herself in tip top shape, health wise. As we all know, almost vampires feed on blood in order to survive. The same is with good old Rayne. She can draw blood from any human or non human near her. This represents a limitless supply of health for her and presents a nice tactical twist to the game. Mercilessly slaughtering everything in sight is no longer a good idea, as a low on health Rayne might just need that living being to boost up her health. By pressing the “E” button Agent Rayne springs to the nearest enemy and grabs a bite, thus boosting her health. Very innovative indeed.
So what prevents this title from gaming greatness? Well here are a couple of reasons. The first one being the sheer level of violence. Please keep in mind that I am not your regular “flower-loving-tree-hugging” reviewer. I can stomach large doses of violence very easily, and in fact have enjoyed violent movies like The Matrix, Terminator 2, Blade etc tremendously. I am also a big fan of the Mortal Kombat series of games, but Blood Rayne takes violence to a whole new level. Agent Rayne spills realistic looking blood with so much ease that it is sickening. She has twin blades on her fore limbs which allow her to cut, chop and slice every living thing out of existence. As you cut open your enemies their blood sprays on the nearby walls, while their exit wounds start bleeding profusely. One of the chief moves of the heroine is to jump high in the air, clank out her blades and then rush down towards an unsuspecting Nazi, neatly removing his limbs. After this move, the poor amputated Nazi hops around with his blood spraying every where, screaming. You can then finish off the pain with one of the many grotesque finishing moves. Mortal Kombat looks like a badly animated cartoon compared to this monstrosity. It is highly recommended by this reviewer that only gamers above the age of 18 should give this game a shot.
The gameplay is also very repetitive. All Agent Rayne does is chop and slice every other enemy that comes her way. There is nothing present to change the mood of the game. All you are doing is clicking the mouse buttons as Rayne is furiously dishing out punishment to her foes. For the first 5 or 6 hours, this act proves to be quite satisfying, but after that it just gets highly monotonous. Max Payne too had fairly uniform gameplay mechanics, but with a convoluting storyline and shorter levels, it presented a far better experience than Blood Rayne. The problem with Rayne is that its levels are way too long and way too linear. There is nothing much to do. Go to point A, kill somebody. Go to point B and repeat. With the power the next generation consoles and PCs offer, such trite gameplay is unacceptable. There were many a times when I died during a mission butI refused to load the game again as it was generating no excitement through its gameplay. On the other hand, GTA: Vice City, a not so dissimilar game, persuaded me to reload after every failed mission as it offered much more gameplay than Rayne.
The controls are also clunky. Many a times the collision detection went off, with blades swiping through enemies and not doing any sort of damage what so ever. Hand to hand combat showed its problems when, at a point in the game, Rayne loses all her guns. A totally inert system of collision detection created a lot of frustration when close body combat reared zero damage results. Plus using the guns is a big headache as you don’t have any active controls over their direction. Although good for a small group of enemies, such a “feature” becomes useless in a larger group of baddies. It is also understandable that a complete action game does not require the intelligence of Half-Life (per say) but some basic evasive techniques would have been much appreciated, instead of hordes and hordes of deaf and dumb enemies rushing towards you.
I am pretty pleased to announce that Blood Rayne did not offer me any significant performance problems on my test rig (given below) and I ran the whole game without crashing. The quality of the cut scenes is pretty good with Hollywood style direction being employed. Keeping in mind the minimal cost of games in Pakistan, I am not taking into consideration the longetivity of the game, and as a consequence an above average score has been awarded to this game. But beware as this game will become monotonous after the first few hours and might just throw you off with its excess violence.
Hardware specifications
Minimum Requirements: Win98 or WinXP, 733 MHz Intel or AMD processor, 128MB RAM, 2 GB hard disk space, 200 MB virtual memory, 4x speed CD-ROM, 64MB GeForce 2 or Radeon video card, DirectX 8.1.
Recommended System: WinXP, Pentium 4 2.53GHz processor or AMD equivalent, 512MB RAM, 2 GB hard disk space, 200 MB virtual memory, 24x speed CD-ROM, GeForce4 Ti 4600 3D card, Sound Blaster Audigy sound card, DirectX 8.1.
Reviewer’s System: WinXP, AMD AthlonXP 2200+, 512 MB DDR RAM, GeForce 4 Ti 4800 SE 128 MB 3D card, SB Live! Sound card, DirectX 9.0a, Settings: 1024x768x32, Quincunx antialising, 8X anisotropic filtering, Maximum detail level.
DSDC rating: 62 per cent
The writer
|
|
|
|
