BloodRayne is a 2002 Action-Adventure Third-Person Shooter developed by Terminal Reality and published by Majesco, and the first of its namesake series.
Rayne is a dhampyr - a half human-half vampire hybrid. She works under the Brimstone Society, an organization seeking to rid the world of vampires (besides Rayne, since she also hates vampires). The game, set in the 1930s interwar period, has Rayne fighting off monsters invading Louisiana and eventually hunting down Nazis looking for the skull of Beliar.
A sequel, BloodRayne 2, was released in 2004.
This game provides examples of the following tropes:
- Affably Evil: The Twins spend as much time flirting with Rayne as they do fighting her.
- AKA47: the guns in game, which also includes ones that won't be invented for another 6 years.
- Alas, Poor Villain: The Twins again, especially if it's Sigmund who is the one to go down first, where Rayne tells him her name as a last request.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Die and reload enough times on any particular checkpoint, and the game will start refilling your health with each new reload, until eventually you're starting at full health.
- Argentina Is Nazi-Land: Hidden Nazi base, naturally.
- Artificial Stupidity: Take a shot every time a Nazi blows himself and his buddies to pieces with his own grenade.
- Audible Sharpness: Rayne's blades typically make metallic 'shing' noises as she swings them, and in the second game, also makes the noise when she deploys them in her lock-on/block stance.
- Aura Vision: It helps Rayne find her objective's location and conveniently shows how much health the non-boss enemies have (bosses have their own life meter).
- Authority Equals Asskicking: The leaders of the G.G.G. have all been "experimentally enhanced", with the bosses all quite capable of matching a half-vampire like Rayne in a fight. Even the non-boss Mook Lieutenant assassination targets are considerably tougher than regular soldiers, having about 4 times as much health and even having a few unique and fairly strong melee attacks.
- Ax-Crazy: The Vampires who Rayne describes as being "monsters, even among vampires."
- Back from the Dead: This is Mynce's specialty.
- Bad Boss: Dr. Bathory drops a grunt into the Daemite pit just so she can talk to Rayne some more.
- Baddie Flattery: The Twins, who constantly remark on and praise Rayne's beauty and skill.
- Batter Up!: Some of the punks in the second level will attack Rayne with baseball bats when it's not crowbars.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: Rayne's handy dandy arm blades!
- Bleak Level: "Lurking Underground" is where you meet Daemites for the first time. At this point, the tone of the game suddenly shifts from plain action to genuine horror. Up until now, you've been fighting ordinary humans, but at the beginning of this level, you follow one of their officers to an underground supply depot only to find it completely devoid of life. Soldiers you've just seen a moment before suddenly vanish, and although you can see them screaming in horror and being attacked by something, there are no bodies left. Even the music goes completely silent, and when it turns back on, it's suddenly really creepy. Rayne, who's been pretty unflappable towards all the weird and scary stuff happening in the game before, now is actually slightly but visibly creeped out. And when Daemites finally make their entrance, they incite fear both by the way they appear (by popping off the heads of soldiers they possessed from inside) and by the fact that they are much, much harder to kill than enemies you fought before, staying alive even after their host body got hacked to pieces.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: The game has this overlapping with Gratuitous German, as the German labels in the excavation site mission have been translated word-by-word, like "Die Pumpe Der Raum" ("The Pump The Room") standing at the entrance of a pump room.
- Body Horror: Daemites possessing humans, to name a few.
- Combat Sadomasochist: The Daemites who beg Rayne to hurt them.
- Continuity Nod: The 3rd Act has several continuity nods to the first act of Nocturne (1999), the survival horror game from which BloodRayne was spun-off from. It takes place in the vampire lord's castle from Nocturne, and it's strongly implied the Heart of Beliar is the Yathgy Stone from Nocturne, which was even described in that game as "rumored to be the heart of an ancient vampire".
- Cutscene Incompetence: The game has Rayne pull out one of the ribs of the Queen of the Underworld, only for it to force its way into her body, causing such intense pain that she is unable to prevent Wulf from ripping it out of her. Fair enough that she didn't know it would do that to her, but then she does it again when she finds the eye of Beliar! While yes, it does grant her sniping abilities, you'd think after the first time she would be a little leerier about grabbing glowing body parts.
- Die, Chair, Die!: Oh yes! Chairs, statues, and even pianos aren't safe from Rayne's arm blades or superhumanly powerful kicks.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Carpathian Dragons are mystical guns powered by blood, and they attach themselves to Rayne by jamming tubes into her arms. Her cries of pain sound a bit... orgasmic. Rayne herself hangs a lampshade on it:Severin: [listening to her screams over the radio] Are you all right, Rayne?
Rayne: Yeah. It's just... the Dragons. They're so beautiful. - Dull Surprise: Rayne for most of the first game talks in a monotone, just displaying enough emotion that you know what's going through her mind. Nothing really seems to shake her (as she said at the start of the game, "I'm just confident in my abilities,") with few exceptions. Then Wulf kills off Mynce. Then she flies into an Unstoppable Rage.
- Elite Mooks: Red-uniformed GGG troops, who have more health and better weapons.
- Equal-Opportunity Evil: The Nazis are surprisingly diverse for, well, Nazis. Their leadership includes among their ranks two women (one of whom is Tibetan), a pair of Siamese twins, a freakish 10-foot-tall cyborg, and an 80-year old man.
- Expy: Rayne was supposed to be Svetlana Lupescu of Nocturne fame, but this was scrapped and she was instead made into her own character, albeit with several similarities to Svetlana.
- Famous-Named Foreigner: So many but one name is really, really an embodiment of this trope — Dr. Bathory
Mengele. - Faux Action Girl: Mynce. Not only does she not do anything of any significance outside of a cut scene, but she gets seemingly killed in the first level by a lone Maraisreq, before being killed for real by Wulf in a move that Rayne survived years earlier.
- Flipping the Bird: Rayne does this enough to make one think she's channeling "Stone Cold" Steve Austin: she does it at least four times during the first ending.
- Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Scratch the friendly part: she is working to wipe out Nazis and cults, but she's very much an anti-hero, doing it for her own ends rather than any "good" benefit for others.
- Ghostapo: The central premise is that the Nazis are seeking occult relics for the purpose of gaining supernatural powers, and Rayne's mission is to stop them.
- Giant Mecha: She fights them in the first game, and practically squeals with joy at getting to drive one.
- Grand Theft Me: The second act features parasites that do this.Parasite: I'll wear you like lederhosen.
- Guns Akimbo: Rayne does virtually nothing but this with the exception of some larger weapons.
- Guns Are Worthless: Despite the wide variety of firearms available in the first game, guns are only really effective against common Mooks (and even then, it takes a good 10 or so SMG rounds to put down a single basic Nazi soldier). Some tougher enemies and bosses take very little (if any) damage from bullets, or are difficult to hit in the first place (especially Daemites). Compounding this problem is the fact that guns don't hold much ammo and can't be reloaded; Rayne discards a weapon upon emptying the magazine, and must pick up another to replace it. On top of all this, Rayne's blades and harpoon are generally more efficient weapons, and it's entirely possible to play through most of the game without firing a shot.
- Handicapped Badass: The Twins, each missing an arm as a result of being born conjoined but then surgically separated, manage to take down an entire pack of vampires in hand-to-hand combat by themselves.
- High-Pressure Blood: Oh lordy...
- Humongous Mecha: The GGG's mobile armor, which are basically tanks on two legs. Rayne borrows one to destroy the rest of the mechas.
- Incredibly Durable Enemies: The Daemite worms aren't that tough against Rayne's blades (you can regularly take them out in one slice if you get the timing right), but aside from that, can be bullet sponges. It takes almost two full magazines of handgun ammo to kill a single one, and quite a few shots from a long gun as well. The only weapons which consistently make short work of them are special long guns or explosives.
- Mêlée à Trois: Happens quite often in the first game.
- In the first episode, the infected townspeople will actually fight with the fully mutated townspeople as well as the Maraisreq. All are trying to kill Rayne.
- Nazis and Daemites fight each other in episode 2. Likewise with Nazis and vampires in episode 3.
- The final battle of the original game is a 3-way fight between Rayne, Belial, and Jurgen Wulf.
- Mirror Boss: Bathory Mengele and later Mynce, both blade-wielding femme fatales, both fight using the same combat style as Rayne.
- Mook Horror Show: The Nazis meanwhile, even at the start of the game, are nothing more then walking blood bags.
- No OSHA Compliance: Several Nazis take shelter under a car lift, which Rayne can lower on them and then mock them over.
- Not Quite Dead: Kommando. After his seeming death, he returns having been taken over by a Daemite.
- Mynce pulls this off twice. Not so much the third time.
- Puzzle Boss: This sets apart the bosses from the Elite Mooks; the bosses have some other condition before you can beat them down.
- Remake Cameo: DarkMan, Rayne's Brimstone Society contact, was voiced by Lynn Mathis, who played Stranger in Terminal Reality's other games Nocturne and The Blair Witch Project
- Sequential Boss: Subverted and parodied. The final boss of Act 2 is a 10-foot tall Nazi cyborg. After you drain his health bar to zero and he collapses, he stands back up again, raises his arms high into the air, and screams "You can't defeat me THAT easily!"... then promptly falls over dead. Rayne even makes a snarky comment about this.
- Serrated Blade of Pain: The female Mad Scientist duel-wields amputation saws.
- She-Fu: Butcheress and Mynce, who love to Chick Kick and handspring during their fights with Rayne.
- Sociopathic Hero: Subverted by Rayne. She has no qualms about slicing someone in half, but she actually makes a point of trying to emphasize her humanity, like her freak-out when Mynce died.
- Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Actual jetpack Nazis show up during the castle section.
- Thicker Than Water: Massively averted. Rayne absolutely hates her family, with good reason and she strongly emphasizes that Kagan's offspring are half siblings.
- Third-Person Person: Hedrox, the hive mind vampire whose chopped off limbs manifest into his clones.
- Throwaway Guns: Once the magazine for the weapon Rayne's holding is emptied, she tosses them aside.
- Unscrupulous Heroine: Rayne doesn't mind making huge bloody messes. She frequently Pays Evil Unto Evil against Nazis and members of a vicious Cult. While she doesn't like humans, Rayne has none of her family's Fantastic Racism against them—and she hates vampires.
- Updated Re-release: BloodRayne and its sequel received a Terminal Cut re-release in 2020 on GOG.com and Steam, which features improved rendering and 4K resolutions, upscaled FMVs, higher resolution uncompressed textures, and native XInput controller support.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- In the mines, you may notice a few doors have been barricaded from the inside with a few Nazis hiding in them. Rayne will actively taunt these poor fellows who are just hiding from the Daemites, even though they offer no resistance; in fact they are outright cowering. They are free health should you need it, but damn.
- Dismembering was very much possible here, particularly with Insane Gibs Mode on. And how it felt... shaving off surplus limbs then watch the Nazi in question writhe in agony, or far away screaming, or try to get away? Blowing off heads? Mincing them into thin little body pieces?
- White Sheep: Aside from Rayne, Mynce also alludes to a half-sister of Rayne's who also works with Brimstone, likely a reference to Svetlana from Nocturne (1999).
- Worthy Opponent: This is also how the Twins and Rayne come to view each other in their boss fight.
- Younger Than They Look: Rayne in the Louisiana section. She was just a teenager at the time, but looked like a fully grown woman.
