Review by: Brandon "ARRRGGHH" Cackowski-Schnell

Half of the people who play BloodRayne: Betrayal will happily tackle the game’s various frustrations, no doubt remembering the olden days of difficult NES platformers and the badges of honor beating those games bestowed. The other half will consider the deck stacked against them as the poor controls and swarms of enemies team up to spell their continual failure before they ultimately decide that their time is better spent elsewhere. Luckily, the decision to play the game is an easy one. If the former appeals to you, then you’ll be all set. If the latter sounds like torture, then steer clear.

The game wastes no time telling what little story there is, assuming you know all about BloodRayne’s dual vampire-human heritage from the previous games and various Uwe Boll movies. BloodRayne has been tasked by the Brimstone Society to help them break into her father’s castle and before you know it, soldiers are shooting you in the face, giant fleshy bomb things are exploding and you’re swarmed with enemies.

Rayne has her signature arm blades as well as a pistol and her rampant vampirism to help manage the deluge of foes, all of which are beautifully animated, however this is definitely a situation where too much is too much. The various combos help paint the screen a lovely shade of crimson but with no way to cancel out of a combo animation, and combos all borne from the same button, it’s way too easy to pull off a combo you didn’t intend and get shot, stabbed or otherwise injured for your troubles. It also doesn’t help that Rayne will often times ignore the standing enemy trying to kill her to instead foot stomp a prone opponent.

Stunning an enemy allows you to bite them a little and infect them with, I dunno, vampire spit, to be detonated at a later time while draining them completely of blood fills Rayne’s health bar. Again, it’s an imprecise system as the enemy has to be stunned before you can bite them and usually the other enemies aren’t all that accommodating to your need for exsanguination. Still, when it works, it works beautifully as you can bite a foe, hurl yourself into the air, along with some enemy torsos and then detonate the infected enemy to blow up whoever wasn’t lucky enough to go flying with you.

Rayne has a dash move that grants her invulnerability and the dash move can be cancelled early, however you pull off a dash by tapping the L2 button which hardly lends itself to a deft touch. Many times you’ll dash through one or two enemies just to end up right in front of another enemy who is all to eager to join the Dr. Van Helsing Stabby Stake Club. If things get too squirrely, you can always draw your pistol to shoot through everything on screen however ammo is limited so you have to be judicious with its use.

The imprecise combat controls are joined by an equally imprecise and frustrating platforming system. Rayne can jump and backflip for a double-jump effect, but the backflip requires you to move in one direction, quickly change direction and then jump, which is all well and good when you have time to get to a higher platform, but becomes a confusing mess when you’re trying to jump with any precision. Similarly, when landing, Rayne skids a few feet, as if ice is on her heels, making quick stops an impossibility. This becomes particularly irksome in a later level of the game where you’ll be forced to run from a giant sawblade as the platforms ahead of you start moving and shrink in size. Nothing says fun like continually missing a moving platform because your character pulls a Wile E. Coyote every time they try and skid to a halt.