Before I begin this review, I’d like to say something to someone who probably won’t read this, but I would like to say it nonetheless, so if you could please stick with me, because there is a point to the following few sentences. You see, a couple of years ago, I was doing some volunteer work at a school in Israel for a youth group. While there, we primarily engaged the students learning English, trying our best to teach them social justice values (yes, yes, I'm a bleeding heart, get over it). The group we liked the best—yes, yes, I know you’re not supposed to have favorites when you’re in the position of being a teacher, but that hardly stops those of us in those positions—were the ones who were in the top of the English learning classes, and not just for the obvious reasons. These kids in particular were the nerds, geeks and overall freaks of the school, a demographic that this particular youth group attracts (it was with them that I learned how to play “Settlers of Catan”). They were also around our age so we had that going as well. And amongst our favorite group was a particular young woman who’s name I will not mention, but was the video game/fantasy nerd of the group. While we primarily talked about our shared love the Assassin’s Creed series, this young woman’s favorite videogame was none other than a little 6th gen title called “Blood Rayne.” With all of this in mind, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to this particular young woman on the very off chance that she’s reading this. I’m sorry, not only for the views I’m about to discuss regarding the BloodRayne franchise, but also for “BloodRayne: Betrayal” in general. If you’re reading this, teenage/possibly 20-something, please do yourself two favors: 1, stop reading here and 2, don’t by buy “Betrayal.” Don’t even pirate it. Don’t even acknowledge its existence. You’ll remain a happier person for it. Long story short, for those of you who weren’t interested in my past, BloodRayne: Betrayal sucks like Rayne does in the minds of the early 2000’s tweens the originals were designed for. To be fair, I haven’t played the original. Until about 2006 or so, I was a diehard Nintendo fan boy who considered so much as buying a non Nintendo game a crime worthy of the death penalty, so my knowledge going into the game was that it was created for an era before deviant art or pornhub allowed people to indulge their Goth fetish fantasies. To be fair, from the looks of things, WayForward had more or less the same amount of understanding and respect for the franchise as I did, and just decided to make “Castlevania: Symphony of Mediocrity” instead. It wouldn’t be so bad, either, if the art style was at least somewhat consistent. From the half-minute or so of YouTube footage I found, the early 2000s iterations at least attempted to build the world around their main character’s design, or at least some sort of central design. While they made Rayne’s face a little more bishie to fit with the overall anime design, the entire aesthetic of the world completely clashes with not only Rayne herself, but also the enemy design. Amidst the male and female vampires dressed in Victorian fashion are also giant blood flies, less freaky necromorphs and big mothers wielding hammers who wouldn’t look out of place in the binding of Isaac. I get that the original Castlevanias had a variety of character designs, they at least attempted to make those designs centralized design, i.e. gothic architecture and literature. But why continue on about the world design when there’s plenty of genuine complaints to be made? Like the horrible platforming. Being pretty much a Castlevania clone, “Betrayal” decided to add a couple of nice platforming sections just to test our patience. To put it lightly, Rayne does not control well. It constantly feels like she’s sliding along on an oil slick or trying to copy the dance scene from “Risky Business.” It doesn’t help that there’s no double jump option. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game was at least designed accordingly, but it appears that some idiot on the dev. team thought that Rayne could get by just fine with the air dash and backflip, both of which are about intuitive as controlling a helicopter with an NES controller. With the backflip in particular is a pain in the ass to pull off. With it, you’ve got to have a running start in the opposite direction you’re going in, turn the thumb stick the other way, pressing jump while doing so. It wouldn’t be so bad if not for 1, it’s necessity in at least one of the boss fights found throughout the game, 2, the devs not telling you about the existence of air dash outright, and 3, the movement controls being slippery as all hell. And while the air dash is a little better, the dash button is the left bumper, making it not exactly the most ideal for platforming. It’s a good thing, then, that the dev. team compensated by having nice, big platforms and easily avoided hazards. Yeah, as if. Most of the of the platforms are the size of a step stool and the random careening saw blades that make their appearance take up most of the damned hallway. Adding insult to injury is the fact that aside from ripping off the general tone of Castlevania, it also took one of it’s least enduring elements: those goddamn flying medusa heads. In “Betrayal,” they’re missiles that literally seem to come out of nowhere, just to add to the complete lack of cohesion in the art department. Okay, new platforming universal law. Don’t make it necessary for the player to have to jump from one platform to another over an instant death chasm while dozens of projectiles are headed their way. I swear, half of the deaths in this game were due to me being hit by a missile while trying to jump over a lake of acid (seriously, who puts instant death acid in a goddamn castle?) from one floating step stool to another only to be thwarted a single goddamn rocket that seems to have come out of no where. The combat fairs a little better in that it’s just mediocre. While the originals might not have been all that better, what with their generic whack noises whenever Rayne hit an enemy, I would at least think that would give room for improvement. Hardly. In “Betrayal” you can barely tell when an enemy has been hit, Rayne’s bladed Tonfa’s barely making a sound as if the enemies are being hit by a light breeze. There’s also a fairly satisfying pistol that can be used, but it’s more of a last resort and has limited ammo. Neither of these would be too bad if not for fact that there’s no sense of progression throughout the game. You start out the game with all the combos (not that I used most of them) and all guns, and through the good chunk of the game I played, despite there being a button to switch out guns. So the only thing to keep add variety to the game is the level design, frankly, that just ain’t enough. That being said, I have the feeling that most of it was based on how well you did on a particular level, and if that really is the case, then there’s no real way I can keep my faith in humanity. I mean it’s one thing to reward people who explore levels or are particularly badass at killing enemies, but that reward should come in the form of some fun extra content, like a new costume or pictures from the Devs. Christmas Party, not, you know, ways to make the game more interesting. If there’s one good idea that this game does have, it’s the infect mechanic. While Rayne had the option to drain enemies of their blood in the originals, “Betrayal” adds the mechanic of letting you choose between simply draining enemies of health or biting them and infecting them, allowing you to make them explode at your leisure. It’s certainly fun, and you even use it in a pair of boss fights, although I do wish that it was utilized more often. As for the plot, well if you’ve ever looked up the BloodRayne franchise on Wikipedia or TV Tropes, you’ll no doubt get the gist of the thing. A vampire named Kagen—who is incidentally Rayne’s father—is up to no good and it’s up to you to storm his castle and kick his ass. In “Betrayal” you meet a vague white raven dude, who may or may not be the one who ends up doing the betraying (incidentally, the sections where you control this prick are worse than the game proper) I wouldn’t know, seeing as how there are only so many times you can be fucked over random missiles throwing you off of stepping stools before your will is broken. And while I see nothing wrong with a hard game, it’s only when those games are hard because the developers did their jobs right as opposed to when the devs didn’t give two craps that it works. I’d rather die a bazillion times in Dark Souls, Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami than die 100 times in “Betrayal.” In the end, “Betrayal” is not the sort of game that will breath new life into the “BloodRayne” franchise. While the originals were never that good to begin with, WayForward could at least have taken the opportunity to make a decent game with what they were given. While I applaud them for following the series traditions, I should probably mention that that tradition includes three movies by Uve Boll. Congradulations, WayForward, for missing a bar set so low it’s practically beneath the floor. “Betrayal” isn’t so much the sort of game that makes you throw your controller against a wall, as much as beat the developer to death with it, and if there are any WayForward employees whose heads aren’t duelaxis shaped by now, let me just say that you lot had it coming.
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AuthorHello all and Welcome to Jacob's Latter. Here I will be giving my opinions on everything from movies, video games and books to my general outlook on the world. Archives
January 2018
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