After years of absence, the BloodRayne franchise is back. This third-person horror action series introduced players to Rayne, a badass half-vampire who travels the world righting wrongs. Whether it's beating down fellow vampires or punching Nazis, Rayne is always busy keeping the world safe, looking into her vampiric heritage, and having some fun along the way. In the early 2000s, BloodRayne and BloodRayne 2 delivered a fast and fun experience to players and critics, serving as a spiritual sister to the Legacy of Kain franchise. Now, Rayne’s full set of adventures will be available on modern consoles.
The effort to re-release the BloodRayne series has been going on for a couple years. It started with BloodRayne: Terminal Cut and BloodRayne 2: Terminal Cut on PC in 2020, which included the first two Bloodrayne games. This release was full of performance improvements, and was optimized to be played with controllers at high resolutions. More recently, WayForward’s BloodRayne: Betrayal has been ported to most platforms with its own improvements as BloodRayne Betrayal: Fresh Bites. Now the first two BloodRayne games will be coming to consoles under the “ReVamped” subtitle, keeping most of the improvements made with the Terminal Cut versions. While it isn't a full franchise revival, it's still nice to have all of the BloodRayne games available on console in their most polished state.
BloodRayne: ReVamped Is Bringing Big Graphical Upgrades
BloodRayne: ReVamped and BloodRayne 2: ReVamped will offer several of improvements, most of them also seen in the Terminal Cut ports. The original fast-action combat and vampire powers of the BloodRayne games have been maintained, and there are not expected to be any content changes with these re-releases. Instead, effort has been put into making BloodRayne and BloodRayne 2 look and run the best they ever have. One of the key enhancements for the ReVamped editions is support for up to 4K, or 3840×2160, resolution. This alone will make these games look better, and they should be playable on any display from the Switch’s tablet screen to a 4K HD TV.
That would normally bring out a lot of imperfections inherent to any old PS2 game, but more work has been done to make the BloodRayne games look more appropriately modern. For example, the cinematic videos that fill both titles have been upscaled. They don't reach the heights of modern AAA cutscenes, but that's to be expected of something so old. The Terminal Cut also included improved rendering with up to 4x anti-aliasing, but it's unclear if these new console ports will share that particular feature.
Other Changes Made in the BloodRayne: ReVamped Games
All of this upscaling is great, but it could be wasted on games built with outdated technology and visual techniques. Fortunately, BloodRayne and BloodRayne 2’s engine has been upgraded, now supporting uncompressed original textures. The lighting has also been improved, and the old lighting data has been fully reprocessed. Various visual effects have also been improved, including reflections, water, fog, and shadows. These sorts of visual changes have been controversial in past remasters, but hopefully BloodRayne: ReVamped will pull them off and look like an idealized version.
The last major feature of BloodRayne: ReVamped and BloodRayne 2: ReVamped are their localizations. BloodRayne: ReVamped supports voiced audio and localized text in English, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. BloodRayne 2: ReVamped only has voiced audio in English and Russian, but it does have localized text for English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. This should help these games spread to new and old players around the world. Now past BloodRayne’s reviled movies and forgotten comics, the cult-classic series is back in full force. With any luck, these remasters can drum up enough interest to continue Rayne’s adventures for real.
BloodRayne: ReVamped and BloodRayne 2: ReVamped release for PS4, Switch, and Xbox One on November 18.
