Feels too polished, the gore is superfluous to the point it feels fake and just for show and drama. The combat and controls feel absolutely terrible and frustrating, and I just simply cannot enjoy it. I much prefer the first BloodRayne.

BloodRayne 2 is like a bite to the neck.

Set in the modern day, in a city that isn't given a name; BR2 follows a half-vampire named Rayne. The daughter of a once powerful but now dead full vampire named Kagan, she has set out on a decades long hunt for her own siblings and has been killing them off one by one to end his deranged blood line. Assisting her in this effort is a man named Severin; an intel agent of sorts who works for a secret group calling themselves the Brimstone Society. Along the way, the pair will discover a deeper plot by her siblings who seem to have come together in their father's memory and are no longer hiding the existence of vampires in the shadows as they work to achieve some greater conspiracy. There is an interesting groundwork laid by what little lore the game presents to players, but nothing is ever expanded on or explained. The script is rife with mcguffins and all manner of monsters that the player will have very little context on how they're related, created, or used. Characters are likewise extremely one dimensional. Rayne will occasionally exhibit some small glimpses of personality beyond her typical sass and cruel sarcasm, but if you're here looking for character arcs; you're gonna come up dry. Characters are prone to talking far too long, practically repeating themselves or saying nothing interesting or of value. The narrative side of BR2 leaves a lot to be desired, given how rich its potential is.

BloodRayne 2 is an action/adventure hack and slash platformer which, like its story, features an extremely solid foundation of ideas but completely fails to do anything meaningful with them. Rayne's most prominent weapons are her giant arm blades, which feature a small number of different combos depending on your movement inputs and whether or not she's locked onto her target. Her blades can be blocked by weapon wielding foes, whose weapons can in turn be knocked away by her kick attacks. Very early on in the game, she also acquires a pair of vampiric guns that will slowly upgrade over the course of the game to feature more modes like a scatter shot blaster or rocket launcher. These guns require blood to be fired, and it is here that we arrive at the central gimmick and downfall of BR2's design: her Feed attack. If a normal sized enemy isn't wielding a melee weapon, Rayne can leap up onto them, bite into their necks, and begin feeding. By default, this refills her HP bar and is the only way in the entire game to get health back, but the process can be interrupted to instead refill a portion of her gun's ammo reserves or to instantly kill the enemy; filling a portion of her Rage meter instead. The Rage meter is used to fuel all manner of powers from super speed and time stop to extra melee damage and even enemy enthrallment. On paper, this core ability is a fantastic and unique thing to wrap the rest of the game's mechanics around, but it makes several incredibly costly mistakes in execution; the first of which is just how long it takes to feed. Feeding to restore HP takes a full five seconds and refilling your guns in this way isn't much shorter. When something this central to the combat takes that long, every single time, the pacing of every fight is a sluggish slog of sitting there watching Rayne take her sweet time re-upping on blood. Far worse however is that this is the only way she can regain HP or ammo. Rage can be regained slowly by landing melee strikes, but Feed Finisher moves are far faster ways of doing this. This puts players completely at the mercy of the developer to supply enemies who can even be fed on in the first place. Midway through the game, regular thugs are nowhere in sight; replaced by hyper lethal and speedy ninjas who can only possibly be fed on from behind and who are unnreasonbly hard to kill in just basic melee combat alone. This is to say nothing of some absolutely disgusting boss fights that supply barely any enemies with whom to refuel on, or who feature bosses that will actively smash you during feeding because you're trapped in a tiny room with them. Rayne also has a chained harpoon she can use to sling enemies around from a distance. Slow to use but highly effective on the single target it's being used on, it will toss them to the ground, off of ledges, or even into lethal environmental hazards. That last option is used exhaustively as the player's only means of progression at a silly number of obstacles that require the same tiresome and simple act of throwing three to five bad guys into something until it gets out of her way. Beyond this, Rayne has a number of most automated but intuitive traversal options for swinging on bars, climbing pipework, and grinding along rails in style. They never come up as anything more meaningful than a slightly different way to get around the map, but being able to fire her guns and even use her blades during most of these actions is an appreciated if under utilized touch. BR2 is janky, unbalanced, and tiresomely repetitive to play. This is a genuine shame, because it really feels like they were onto something.

BR2 isn't the ugliest game you'll ever play but it certainly isn't going to win any production awards either. Environments will range from vaguely pleasant if a bit lifeless to downright drab and uninteresting to look at. Enemy character designs feature all manner of bafflingly strange men and women who look like they're from a local circus or punk rock venue and have nothing in common with their vampire commanders designs. The main characters feature a few very interesting looks, like Ferril, whose mostly naked body is covered in constantly shifting tattoo work, Sound design is very middle of the road, but its shortcomings are most often exacerbated by the horrible music implementation which will often leave long sections of pure silence. When the music isn't playing, it's little more than looping ambience, metal, synths, or club music. Some of it is even pretty easy to bang your head too, but you'll likely forget it the second you shut off the game. Voice acting is, like the rest, adequate and little more than that. The game does feature some appreciated details like actual guns putting actual holes in cloth that can be seen through or the over the top gore system for cutting enemies apart. What goes very unappreciated is hearing Rayne and her enemies repeat the same five voice lines every and over again, some of which are full run on sentences that simply refuse to end.