Rayne is back
While I never played the original Bloodrayne: Betrayal; I recall hearing about its blistering difficulty and while I loved the character it was a major turn off. Now some 11 years later Rayne has been no doubt slumbering waiting for her time to return, and thanks to the folks at Ziggurat Interactive the original developers, WayForward was able to awaken Rayne and give her a totally HD makeover in the process.
MSRP: $19.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, Switch, PC
Price I’d Pay: $19.99
BloodRayne: Betrayal: Fresh Bites is a 2D hack ‘n slash platformer; taking the titular dhampir Rayne from her 3D roots. As I said above the original release in 2011 was known for its brutal difficulty, fights were fast and frantic and could end quickly with only a few mistakes from the player. Luckily, original developer WayForward tinkered with the difficulty and made it a tad bit easier; not to say that the game is by any means easy but after trying the original included difficulty and not making it off the first level; I found much more success with the retooled mode. Graphically Fresh Bites looks great, the upscaled graphics are free of any of the “jaggies” from the original edition and from the environment to the characters everything has a smooth, dark and gothic look.
Combat in the game is a hack ‘n slash fest, while seemingly simple at first once the player takes a look at Rayne’s move list they’ll find “it’s not a lake, it’s an ocean”. Rayne has a slash button, jump button, dash, detonate button and a bite button; her slash can be changed depending on direction and consecutive button presses to some success. Combos also play a part; a timer will begin when each combat arena is entered and the player has to kill all enemies as fast as they can. It’s never explained what this does, or anything so the player is left to assume it’s just to chart on a leaderboard. I had issues fighting when surrounded; for whatever reason the game wouldn’t respond to the button presses to change direction fast enough. So, it would end with Rayne taking damage and breaking her combo chain; which is odd because this enhanced version runs at 60fps.
The story is really just a reason to pit Rayne against waves of blood-thirsty night creatures; nothing ground-breaking here. While it was nice to have original Rayne voice actress; Laura Bailey and have Troy Baker back as Kagen, it just feels like there were greater opportunities to improve this game that were missed. For one, there is no real direction for anything other than moving left to right and fighting. The player is never told that if Rayne bites an opponent but doesn’t suck them dry, she can detonate them and make them into a flesh bomb. Never is the player directed to look at Rayne’s move list to find out that she has a whole array of moves at her command, its as if part of the game’s difficulty was to see if the player would dig through the menus to find out what to do.
As a fan of the original two BloodRayne games I am excited to see one of my favorite dhampirs back in the gaming spotlight. On the other hand, I wish that Ziggurat would have brought those remastered games from PC to console. Betrayal: Fresh Bites isn’t a bad game at all, its just not a great example of BloodRayne at it’s best; even with the new HD bells and whistles. My hope is that this game will give Rayne some attention and make the developers see that she is a character worthy of not only a remaster but a brand-new adventure.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
