Bloodrayne: Betrayal Review October 3, 2011

I’m happy to see that Majesco is getting back to taking up their major properties and making games with them again.  I had stated in the Psychonauts top five video that after the end of 2005, the company switched over to value software and stopped producing triple-a titles, which really upset me because I liked their properties a lot and hoped they would do more with them.

The first Bloodrayne game in over five years, Bloodrayne Betrayal has been released for download on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 and I got to play it on the Playstation 3.

I know what you’re thinking.  Awesome, a new Bloodrayne game.  That means we get to see things like this!

Well… no, not exactly.  The developers decided that the series would get a new gameplay style and a visual aesthetic to match that would be more in line with anime or a comic book.

I am not saying that this new style is a bad thing at all.  I liked this game’s art style a lot.  I am a huge comic book art fan and I didn’t mind the new style to go with the 2D gameplay.  The 2D combat perspective with a focus on fighting and platform navigation harkened back to earlier platforming games like Castlevania.  Now I’m sure every reviewer on the internet is going to make that comparison, as well as plenty of gamers, so let me just join in on that parade right now, but that’s only because it is a fair comparison.

When I first started the game I noticed the music is actually pretty good.  Sound on the PS3 is limited to stereo…for…some…reason.  For those of you who need a slight audio history lesson, the PS3 can do uncompressed 7.1 audio through HDMI.  Stereo sound has been in games since the days of the SNES.  You will find yourself closely listening to the stereo music through the game (which is not that bad) because there’s no voice over work.  The little dialog there is in the game is spoken only by text bubbles over characters.  This does fit with the comic book art style, and I can see what the developers were going for.

On the other hand when you look past the art and music to focus only on the gameplay, you get to the bad of the game.  This game can get downright sadistic.  There were some stretches of levels that made me want to throw my controller across the room.  Just when I’d think the game was getting good (or I was getting better at playing it) it would throw me a new sadistic stretch of a level or a boss fight.  I know a lot of independent bloggers found Catherine sadistic in this respect and the difficulty of some of that game’s levels lost them some points in their review of that game, I had no problem with Catherine’s difficulty because anyone could just look up a solution to Catherine’s puzzles online.  In Bloodrayne: Betrayal, no walkthrough or guide can help you, you have to beat the game out of your own sheer force of will.

It seemed to me early on there was a really fun game in there somewhere, if only the game showed me how to play it.  Since the game is downloadable, there’s no paper manual you can look up for gameplay tips while playing.  You’ll occasionally get a small tip sprinkled through the first few levels, but it would have helped a lot better to have a whole training level devoted to each of the new gameplay mechanics early on.  Major gameplay features, like the ability to corrupt enemies by biting them, and then using them to detonate other enemies around them are not explained early on, and when they are they are poorly explained as to how important the sequences are!  Corrupting enemies was a new feature that we’ve never seen Bloodrayne do in any previous incarnation, and it’s a major gameplay device in this game you’ll need to survive some of the more swamped fights!  The game doesn’t even show a tooltip as to how to do it until several chapters into the game, and by that point you’ll have referred to either the manual or an online FAQ and learned how to do it.

Never in my life have I had to refer to a game manual as much as I have for this game, and since the game is digital only, there is no paper manual for you to refer to.  You will find yourself constantly checking the in-game menu, breaking up the game’s flow, just to see the button combinations for doing the moves that are essential to progressing through the game.

Fighting enemies, espessially early on, can get very boring very fast.  The game will just keep throwing in the same enemies you’ve fought over and over again just to pad out a chapter and there are very few total enemy types in the game, with no diversity among them.  You can be in a section of the game and fight four enemies, then have to fight four more of the exact same enemies.  This kind of grinding can get VERY boring very quickly, and it even happens in the first level.  Later in the game, boss fights will include padded battles with respawning enemies that will get more difficult.  This just serves to soften you up before the boss battle, oh and there will be no checkpoints unless you can defeat all the enemies, and the boss in one life bar.  Even with the ability to take life from normal enemies, this can still be VERY difficult, since you can’t take life from the bosses.

As I mentioned earlier, there are some fun gameplay segments in the game.  In one chapter, you have to control a bird and navigate through a narrow section since Rayne cannot navigate through it herself.  While playing it, I thought “well this is a nice little segment, maybe the level design has improved from here on,” and then I would be forced to play the most sadistic, frustrating platform segments you can ever imagine with poorly placed checkpoints.  It will be in these segments I actually had thoughts that the people who gave me the code to review this game must’ve hated me!

The bosses can start off as boring at best with tedious ways to defeat them and scale up to outright overwhelmingly frustrating very quickly.  One boss fight starts off with a battle royale against many enemies all at once that spawn in, while random danger zones appear in the area which can hurt you very badly and kill the enemies.  After you’ve cleared out the enemies, you’re then given a boss fight with no checkpoint or heal opportunity in between, and some of those boss’s attacks are unavoidable.

Finally I want to talk about the game’s price.  After everything I’ve said about the game I completely understand that there are gamers out there that eagerly yearn for challenging 2D platform games harkening back to the original NES or Super NES game systems.  This is that game.  However, I remind you that this game is being sold for $15US in 2011, whereas you can already get games like Castlevania through the Wii Virtual Console for 5-8 dollars!  Even if I had
enjoyed the game more than I had, I could have an easier time recommending it to fans who enjoy challenging 2D platform games had it been priced at a much more reasonable $10.  At that price, I would say that it would be a fair value to people who sought a challenge.  Other retro-style titles already have come out for download for $10 on all the consoles, like Mega Man 9 and 10 from Capcom.  But for $15, you’re putting the game on par with modern downloadable games with a Triple-A budget, and modern gameplay, and this is not that kind of game.  Be it the price, the frustratingly hard platform segments, and the padded, repetitive fights, I cannot recommend this game to the vast majority of you.  If they ever drop the price to a more reasonable 10 dollars, I would recommend it only to people who craved an intense and frustrating challenge, and all the personal accomplishment you’ll get from completing it.

However, a nice thing that’s being included with people who purchase the PS3 version of the game is a Playstation 3 dynamic theme.  It’s automatically added to your download queue when you purchase the game (or redeem a prepaid code to download the game).  However, this was billed as a limited time offer, and by the time you read this review, I don’t know if the theme will be still offered for download with the game.

Part of the reason why this review took so long to write was because it took me so long to actually force myself to beat the game.  I had to force myself to play through the game’s very difficult, frustrating segments in order to continue in the game to conclusion, and I would not be able to look at myself with any respect if I were to review a game without first beating it.

However, I would like to applaud Majesco for bringing its franchises back from the dead, and hope that they will continue to produce games from their back catalog of properties.  I would love to see this momentum continue with a new Bloodrayne sequel, and many have requested a new Advent Rising game.  But if I had to choose one property Majecso should revive that I enjoyed the best, (and Psychonauts doesn’t count because they don’t own it anymore) it would be a new Infected game.