Everybody has a game they consider a guilty pleasure, and the original BloodRayne was mine when it came out two years ago this month. It had a hot chick slicing and dicing Nazis with huge blades attached to her arms, a host of weaponry, and a great B-movie horror style about it. Unfortunately, monotonous combat eventually ground down the fun factor and kept it from true greatness, though it sold well. The sequel has gone far to improve the variety of the combat model, but BloodRayne 2 can't quite escape some trappings of the original. The PC version also has a disappointing gamepad implementation and a drifty camera, making its guilty charms that much harder to appreciate.
BR2 starts out with the title character in the midst of wreaking vengeance upon the entire family tree of the enemy who killed her family. We've also jumped ahead seventy years, but Bloodrayne, being a "dhampir," half-vampire and half-human, doesn't seem to have aged a day. In the intervening years however, the powerful family she's pledged to destroy has made plans of their own, and it takes a page right out of the Blade playbook--vampires will take over the world and kill all humans by blocking out the sun, and it's up to her to put a stop to it.