BloodRayne: Betrayal review

There’s a simple and pleasantly old-fashioned design principle running through the centre of BloodRayne: Betrayal: first, make it difficult, and then make it rewarding. So instead of a mere double-jump, you get a beautifully animated double-height backflip that you can only pull off by dashing one way, spinning on your heels, and then leaping at just the right second. Instead of health potions, you get the option to drink enemies’ blood – a manoeuvre that comes with a tiny, but crucial, period of invulnerability, adding a tart strategic element to the meter management.

Forget the unintentional horrors of the past, WayForward’s latest is a BloodRayne game in name and cast only. That said, it’s not quite the Castlevania clone that the gothic side-scrolling and dash move suggest either. Betrayal rates the sheer joy of fighting over cartographic complications, and when it throws in some tricky but satisfying platform sections it feels less like exploration and more like another kind of combat: you against the environment, against wall blades, acid baths and laser-powered rafts made of corpses.

Yes, it’s hard, but it’s also intensely rewarding, and its few genuine sticking points – one distinctly cheap multi-wave boss fight, and a spike-ridden gauntlet that sees you pursued by a vast circular saw – are enlivened by the manner in which they force you to engage with the game’s beautifully exacting controls. Controls that allow for air combos with an ideal sense of weight and collision, a knockback kick that sends a screenful of foes dropping like dominos, and a thudding revolver to get you out of the really difficult spots. Even that health system has a neat and nasty wrinkle to it: pull out of a drain move early and your enemies become toxic bombs you can set off at will, triggering waves of chained destruction if you get the timing just right.

A lot of things in WayForward’s latest require that just-right mentality. Betrayal demonstrates exactly the kind of creative precision that shines through the developer’s previous games, whether it’s the jumpless speed-run platforming of Mighty Flip Champs or the centrifugal forces of Mighty Milky Way. Betrayal’s as pretty as you might expect – a cartoon blend of Hammer and Hellboy that’s splashed into life in sooty purples and throbbing crimsons – and it has the same granite demands when it comes to mastery, with your first run-through unlikely to lift you above an F grade.

With games like Wii title A Boy And His Blob on its CV, WayForward is a studio with a real talent for reanimating dead IPs. In BloodRayne’s case, it’s done enough to shake a shambling wraith out of its coffin and render it an elegant, challenging treat. [8]

Xbox 360 version tested.