Closing Comments:
Although the special moves aren't really necessary, you'll be able to do things like Ghost Feed, which detaches your soul to feed on someone while you fight someone else, and upgrade to your Fury attack that visually enhances your weaponry and turns you into a Dervish from Hell, and that grenade launcher thing I mentioned earlier. What Blood Bomb does is fire an explosive into someone that explodes a couple seconds after it gets lodged inside them. This truly is the chunkiest game I've ever played. There's also a super speed boost, but your points drain pretty fast with this one on. Time Dilation also uses points now, but it's only a trickle.
Thanks to how the harpoon has been integrated into the extensive environmental interaction, and the superior visuals, and more varied gameplay, BloodRayne 2 stands above the original. Thanks to some broken scripting, easy combat (with no difficulty levels available) and incongruent acrobatics, BR2 isn't hugely better, only noticeably better. I also prefer the original weapon implementation, since the current one gives you basically one magazine per weapon--40 rounds for the SMG, which converts to 10 shells for the shotgun, then five cartridges for the Blood Bomb, and you have to do a special attack every time you want more ammo. Also , doing this attack means you can't do the one that gets you health or the one that gets you more Rage. I liked the variety and freedom of grabbing any old weapon and blasting away, and just running over a gun to get more ammo. However, I like the more varied environments here, pole-jumping notwithstanding.
In the end, BloodRayne 2 has made a few irksome design choices while improving other areas, but it should appeal to fans of the first game regardless. Hopefully they can beef up the enemies a little for the sequel, and take out the pole-jumping or at least give the pole-jumping some context.
