BloodRayne (GameCube) Review
The Early 2000s Summed Up in a Single Game
~by tankMage (April 2025)
Score: 83/100 (Good)
BloodRayne has players running through endless corridors, burning through ammo, and dispatching Nazis in a variety of gruesome manners all set to a techno beat. For good measure, several buxom vampiresses play significant roles, including Rayne herself. It’s difficult to name titles that do a better job capturing the spirit of this era of gaming than BloodRayne… for better or worse.
Anything this violent and gratuitous is going to have both detractors and ardent fans, so it’s not surprising BloodRayne can be seen as divisive among critics. Beneath all of the edgy 2000s angst lies a solid action title that manages to entertain without doing anything extraordinary. If anything, the overall game design is very orthodox aside from the ability to feed on enemies and use them as human shields.
While the overall design is competent, there’s a few things which could have used a bit of work. Most players, especially those used to modern systems, will find the graphics lacking. The inventory system for the weapons Rayne finds works, but it doesn’t give players much control over ammo and what they carry. There’s also a lot of backtracking and empty hallways which seem intentionally designed to stretch out overall play time. Lastly, I found this game really easy even on Hard Mode, so veteran gamers will probably blow through this title in a couple of sessions.
It’s raining blood, hallelujah!
BloodRayne’s narrative doesn’t do anything special. It’s basically Hellboy meets Indiana Jones, but with a vampire. At first I was fairly excited to see where the story was going as it starts in Louisiana in the 1930s, then a Nazi popped up and I knew how it would pan out. I was really hoping the story was going to delve into American gothic horror, maybe taking players to places like Salem and New Orleans, but no such luck.
If you’re familiar with Wolfenstein, you won’t be surprised by the stuff that pops up in BloodRayne. In fact, the story often feels like an homage to Wolfenstein and Indiana Jones, with a lot of ideas lifted from the former. There’s also a reference to the first Indy movie hidden fairly early on in the game.
As for Rayne herself, she’s hard to relate to. Terminal Reality tried to set her up as a sexy femme fatale, but she has an uncanny valley thing going on that makes her nightmarishly unsettling. Maybe the marketing department is responsible for the rather strange presentation of Rayne as a sexy female lead, but I don’t think that’s the case. At the very least, her wise cracks are entertaining and she doesn’t whine like many video game characters from this time.
Visceral Visuals
While BloodRayne has a lot of atmosphere and some cool character models, the graphics don’t exactly push the GameCube to its limits. Textures could have used a bit more detail and the character models could have been a touch smoother. There’s also a lot of aliasing in places, but I’m not sure if this was a BloodRayne problem or a GameCube problem, either way it can get annoying.
The settings are also hit or miss. Louisiana was a great start, with flooded out cemeteries, rotting buildings, and a ship graveyard, then players are sent to a run of the mill WWII military base full of winding tunnels. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say there are a few interesting places in the second and third acts, but the game largely fails to live up to the first act.
If there’s one thing BloodRayne does right, it’s gore. Rayne can latch onto enemies to bite them and guide them around with the camera zoomed in while slurping their blood. This effect alone is really cool and it’s enhanced by the fact that the action doesn’t stop for her to feed. Blood rains everywhere in combat (no pun intended) and enemies frequently lose limbs or get completely gibbed.
As for animations, BloodRayne’s moves are fairly well choreographed and she does some really acrobatic stuff. However, her spin jump could have used a transitional animation; as it stands it looks pretty bad. Explosions look awful, like a bad phone game and are easily the worst looking I’ve seen in some time. Seriously, there’s NES games with better explosions.
Terminal Reality deserves some credit for creative use of filters in the form of Rayne’s various types of vision. I forget the names of her specialized vision abilities, aside from Blood Rage which is more of a combat skill. Regardless, each one changes the way the player sees the world through her eyes. While I doubt this is the first game to use filters that have a real impact on gameplay, the concept was still fairly new in 2002. Better yet, one of her vision settings allows her to see the location of her targets, which was a clever idea and far better than having the obnoxious quest markers seen in modern games strewn everywhere.
Slice, dice, shoot, repeat.
BloodRayne is best described as a third person shooter where melee combat plays a huge role. Fast paced, limb chewing combat is this title’s primary draw and it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. Rayne hacks up, zombies, Nazis, demons, and even other vampires all while cartwheeling and making quips.
Her primary weapons are a pair of ummm…arm swords which she can switch from backhand to forehand. Terminal Reality was trying to be original with these weapons, but I’m not in love with the concept. Her sword arms are fun to use, so I guess they were onto something. That said, they seem a bit goofy to me. Fighting feels fluid and her moveset evolves as the game progresses.
One really nice aspect of the combat engine is Rayne locks on to the nearest target seamlessly, which keeps the action flowing. The automatic lockon system somehow works better than that of some modern games as Rayne almost always managed to pick the most relevant target.
Rayne also finds all sorts of guns and can carry about eight weapons at a time. She tends to dual wield her firearms, which really keeps the lead flying, though it also means she’ll run through ammo rapidly.
Rayne can also latch onto most enemies and suck their blood. This serves as both a means of slaughtering her opponents and refills her life. Some bosses and tougher Nazis are resistant to this attack and Rayne can still be damaged while doing the old sucky sucky, so it’s not a be all end all. Snacking on German soldiers isn’t just a way of dispatching them, it’s also Rayne’s only means of healing, so it’s quite important to uh…suck the occasional Nazi dry when she gets low on health, so to speak.
Rayne gets a harpoon that can haul in enemies or simply damage them. It’s easy to overlook the utility of the harpoon as Rayne’s blades and guns are far more flashy, but the harpoon has its uses. For those playing on Hard Mode, which ain’t all that hard, the harpoon can be good for taking out smaller enemies who are often dangerous in packs. It’s also good for separating normal soldiers from their buddies when Rayne needs a quick snack.
Finally, Rayne can enter Blood Rage mode after filling up a meter by damaging bad guys. In Blood Rage mode, time slows down and Rayne can perform super powerful attacks. It only lasts about thirty seconds, but thirty seconds is all you need to get the job done. Managing the Rage meter adds a bit of strategy to the game and it’s fun to stomp bad guys with it, but it feels like an afterthought at times since it isn’t necessary to use it often.
Terminal Reality was smart enough to realize all of Rayne’s shiny powers tipped the scales in the player’s favor a bit too much, so they made sure some enemies cannot be bitten or harpooned easily. In other situations, the devs made it so certain weapons like guns worked better on some foes. These choices helped balance the game to some extent, but you’re not going to struggle with most encounters.
Aside from killing stuff, players will have to explore and find the occasional battery or explosive to move on. It’s a good thing that combat is fun, because the exploration aspect of this title is less than stellar. A good third of the game has players running back and forth between hallways, which is a real waste of time. Luckily, the other two thirds of the game are more competently designed and even force players to get creative as they look for objectives.
It’s easy…right up until the last boss.
As much as I love this era of gaming, I often had to turn the difficulty up as high as possible to satisfy my masochistic urge to get my digital ass beat. BloodRayne got the exact same treatment, but I was unimpressed by Hard Mode.
I won’t say I didn’t die, however most of the deaths I took were the result of dumb mistakes on my part. The only parts of the game I found remotely challenging came near the end. In one area, Rayne has to cross a minefield while guys with RPGs try to turn her into vampire flavored jello. To ensure the area was a tad more difficult, they threw in an exploding bridge sequence.
Then there’s the final boss fight, which was a confusing mess. I’m still not sure why I could not damage one of the enemies in the boss fight at certain points and it was really difficult to find the other boss’s weak spot. In the end, I felt the last boss was kind of difficult due to poor design rather than being a brilliantly thought out challenge.
I really liked that part of BloodRayne (the bridge, not the last boss) and found myself wishing the entire game was like that, with Rayne struggling to survive as enemies hunted her with tanks, rocket launchers, and other high powered weapons. Sadly, BloodRayne did not turn out like that and it’s pretty easy even on “Hard Mode”. That said, there’s nothing wrong with a casual game and I appreciate BloodRayne for what it is, especially after playing the steaming turd that was Darkened Skye. If anything, I would recommend playing this game on normal just to avoid excessive headaches with the last boss.
Broken Wire-Fu
There is one power so absolutely, mentally, insanely busted that it needs its own section in this review and that’s Rayne’s Slow Time ability. Yes, she can do the Matrix slo-mo, bullet dodging thing and it’s baffling that the devs included this ability without limitations. Rayne can slow time whenever the player wants and for as long as he or she wants. With time slowed to something like 25%, Rayne can side step bullets and get up to all sorts of shenanigans. There’s no cool down or power meter for Slow Time either.
As you may have guessed, this ability completely breaks the game, sucking any hint of challenge from it. To be fair, there were points in my playthrough where I relied heavily on this ability, so I’m not going to pretend I didn’t like it, but it does showcase the kind of devil may care mentality behind the game design. Whether you think Slow Time is a problem or a fun part of the game is up to you and I’m not going to hold anything against Terminal Reality for including it since it’s fun to use.
The UI sucks harder than Rayne in a blood bank.
BloodRayne’s UI has a lot of failings. While the controls are really smooth and doing things like jumping or attacking feels great, the menus and button layout leave a lot to be desired. First off, players are prompted to choose from a number of control schemes labeled “First Person” and “Third Person”. This alone is misleading, because the options lead me to believe that players could choose between first and third person perspectives, when the game is always third person. Secondly, the third person control scheme is absolute trash. In many (or all) of the setups, the melee attack and shoot buttons are on the shoulders, which is kind of uncomfortable. They should have put them on the face buttons or triggers.
Then there’s the way the game handles guns. Aside from misnaming all of the guns (IE Ithaca Shotguns are Ethica) they also made this weird inventory bar thingy that displays them and the player have to use the R Trigger to cycle through them. Rain always dual wields and you can’t drop guns until they are out of ammo. The system is really confusing at first, despite its simplicity, and generally robs players of options. Wolfenstein (which this game clearly emulates to some degree) figured out how to handle gun inventories almost a decade before Rayne bit her first Natzy, so I’m not sure why the system is such a mess. I’ll let the strange gun names slide as their may have been trademark issues, but the other stuff is just weird considering how well the controls work otherwise.
It’s like a night at an early 2000s goth club!
The music in this game is really hard to hear, but it’s the kind of late 90s techno that was in movies and clubs at the time. Personally, it’s not to my taste and really clashes with the WW2 setting of the game. Something more horror oriented may have worked better.
If you like voice acting, there’s plenty of it and it’s good. In fact I’d say it’s a cut above most games from this time, though it would be overshadowed as the sixth generation of consoles matured. Rayne and the Nazzzies talk an awful lot, but they only have so many lines. Consequently, you’ll hear Rayne spout “Quiet baby, what will the neighbors think!” and other punchlines ad infinitum. Her jokes get old really fast and I’m happy she doesn’t talk much in the cutscenes.
Final Thoughts
This is another one of those “play the rest after you’ve played the best” kind of games. There are quite a few superior third person shooter type titles out at this time ranging from Battle Front to RE4. I also liked The Suffering better than BloodRayne, so it lags behind even among the second tier TPS titles. However, if you are really into vampires in push-up-bras and dismemberment, you may love this game. As it stands, it’s good and makes for an entertaining afternoon, but don’t expect much depth.
Thanks for reading my review of BloodRayne!
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