In case you weren't familiar with the BloodRayne series when it first came around, it was a game mostly focused on the premise that game systems were powerful enough to render polygonal boobs, and by God the industry was going to find a reason to render every conceivable possible type of them.  BloodRayne was our adolescent introduction to vampire-styled boobies, as Rayne, as sexy vampress, roamed the world sucking blood out of ***, which, in all fairness, is more story than a game about vampire boobies needs, so points for trying.  They put out more effort than the movies did.

The game industry as a whole has gotten over their need to render boobs for boobs sake, so I was excited to see where BloodRayne would head in a modern gaming environment.  The answer is somewhere between Castlevania and Super Meat Boy.

The game follows Rayne as the secret international conspiratorial organization she works for sends her to break up a meeting of a secret international organization of vampires.  Or something.  You get about two sentences of back story before you're dropped into the game--Bad Dudes has a deeper story.  And dropped is literal.  You move between most levels by way of a rocket powered coffin drill that always enters from the sky and exits into the ground, which is almost as awesome as it sounds.  In between coffin rides, Rayne slashes, shoots, and sucks her way through levels of the same three enemies over and over, as well as the occasional sun lamp, which vampires hate but apparently surround their fortresses with to keep other vampires away.  When you're lucky, a level will add a new enemy type to the mix, up until the game gives up on new enemy types and decides on complex gauntlets of environmental hazards instead.

The controls are too mushy for any of these tasks to be pulled off well.  The computer will decide sporadically that you're not allowed to attack because an enemy is about to do an attack animation that will hit, meaning you'll spend most of your combat sucking enemies' blood, since that's the only animation you can do that won't be interrupted for nonsense reasons.  Platforming is worse, as it often requires you to do the most frustrating reverse-direction backflip since Mario 64 tried to teach us how to do it from scratch.  When you add in the complex death traps the game throws at you later on, the frustration will increase exponentially, as you try to dance around Super Meat Boy style hazards with a sprite sporting the size and grace of China Warrior.

The real shame here is that a game so bland an frustrating can look so good.  The characters are just 2D sprites in a mild anime style, but their animations are the most fluid you'll see this side of BlazBlue.  Maybe it was a memory issue that in so few but gorgeously rendered characters in the game, because it's almost criminal that a game can move so fluidly in video but be so staunched in actual play.

In any case, the care in animation doesn't make up for the lack of effort in the other aspects of the game, so I'm going to have to give BloodRayne: Betrayal a

GRADE: C+