You play as Rayne, a sexy red-haired dhampir (half-human and half-vampire). When the game starts, Rayne is trying to find the members of her family that are still alive, hoping to remove them from the world, permanently. The developers certainly did a good job of bringing you up to speed on Rayne's background story from the first game, and I never felt lost for not having played it. As the game progresses, the story takes on more epic proportions and those that have seen the Blade movies will see a lot of similarities here.

TECHNICAL
The graphics are certainly beautiful and from what I've seen of the first game, a huge improvement. The controls do feel a bit clunky. In order to access Rayne's vampiric abilities, you have to use the D-PAD. Since you use both sticks - one to move Rayne around and the other to look around - having to reach for the D-PAD to use powers feels a bit unnatural in a lot of cases.

Also, when you block, you pretty much just block one bad guy and whoever is in front of you. In order to execute the harpoon move, you have to block first, which again, doesn't feel very organic, especially when fighting big numbers of enemies at the same time.

Rayne has some cool looking moves, like swinging from poles and sliding down rails. However, although the game doesn't require perfection to pull off these moves, at the same time this methodology can get in the way of controlling the character. For example, if you jump in the general direction of a rail you'll kind of stick to it. However, when trying to get off it, if there's another rail nearby you might end up sticking to that one instead. When trying to do this in the middle of a fight, it can be a bit frustrating.

CREATIVE
The animation is very slick and the character models are beautiful. It's probably as good as you can get these days and as mentioned before, significantly superior to its predecessor. There's a big variety in terms of the looks for your enemies, but you fight so many of them that they do become repetitive through sheer volume.

The blood looks quite nice... and I warn you, there's lots of it. This is a very chunky-friendly game. Considering that the Rayne's main weapons are blades, and that she's a vampire... well, you get the idea. This game doesn't hold back when it comes to showing you what exactly those blades can do.

When it comes to sound the game does a good job with the environmental aspect of it. Some of the sounds are even a bit gross, again, the game doesn't hold back in this area. Rayne's voice is perfect, and in general the voice acting is good, although not great. The music is good, but not memorable. It does fit the tone and theme of the game quite well.

GAMEPLAY
As Rayne, you'll progress level after level dealing with waves of thugs ranging from vampire wannabes to more supernatural creatures. There are no power-ups, ammo or anything to collect. The only thing to collect is well, blood. When it comes to melee combat, you'll be using your very sharp blades and kicks. You also have access to a number of finishing moves that in reality are quite easy to pull off... as long as multiple enemies are not attacking you at the same time.

For range combat, you use a pair of special guns you eventually get in the game. Your guns will evolve, and become more powerful, able to do more than just shoot regular bullets. The guns have their own blood pool, so to speak, and when they run out of blood they'll start feeding on your health to power themselves.

You can feed to replenish your guns, and of course, to replenish your own health. Feeding is also a quick way of disposing of enemies, although enemies that are armed with things like bats or crowbars will be able to easily toss you off them. The deeper you go into the game the harder it'll be to feed when you need it.

Finally, you have access to a harpoon weapon. This weapon allows you to harpoon enemies and then fling them around. You'll have to do this a whole lot in some of the areas, since you'll need to break down machines and what not by flinging enemies into them. The game is very forgiving and as long as you fling someone in the general direction, it'll register as a hit for the puzzle-like sequences, however I found using the harpoon to not be an exact science and I ended up throwing people around in the wrong direction quite a lot. In the earlier stages, the harpoon is a very effective way to disarm enemies too, however later in the game almost all enemies seem to block your harpoon, making them harder to disarm and feed from.

Rayne also has access to a number of supernatural powers that range from being able to sense the path she must take and seeing hidden entrances to vampiric lairs (this translates to her being able to see objects in the environment she can manipulate to move around, like poles and chain fences she can climb, a very useful bit actually) to unleashing her rage and doing higher damage.

The one thing that detracts from the game in my opinion is that it relies too much on trial and error. You'll find yourself redoing areas over and over again as you try to figure out what to do or how to best clear it. Although in the beginning the slick looking moves help carry the game, after seeing the same moves over and over and over again, they become repetitive. I wish they had different finishing moves you could unlock, for example.

Also, the levels are an odd of combination of being too linear and sometimes, hard to figure out. I found myself using the vampiric lair power to figure out what I could latch onto in order to move around a whole lot, to the point that except for boss fights, I almost played the whole game with that power turned on.

IN CONCLUSION
Although BloodRayne 2 is a fun game, there is still a lot of room for growth if they decided to do another sequel to this one. The story is interesting, although not exactly new. The gameplay is stylish and it can be cathartic when you're trying to relieve stress. However, it starts becoming a bit repetitive and turns into the formula of running through a level, killing regular thugs and then facing a boss. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Too much trial and error and the game sadly goes from great to good after a while. If you don't mind gory games, you definitely want to at least check this game as a rental.