BloodRayne: Betrayal is a side-scrolling hack and slash game aiming to reboot the BloodRayne series. I personally remember the series pretty well. I’ve only played a smidgen of the first game but I remember it and its sequel receiving mixed reviews. BloodRayne: Betrayal was developed by a different studio however  and it garnered a lot of positive prerelease buzz and after playing the demo I can see why.

I’m not sure how much the plot is related to the previous games, but the demo contained two stages that had me fighting to reach a castle. An army was trying to get to it, but they weren’t going to be able to handle the occultist enemies so they called in Rayne.

The game looked phenomenal. The animation was really slick and the graphics were dark but pretty. The same goes for the soundtrack. There were a lot of sad piano riffs and a lot of epic rock mixed with orchestral instruments.

I hacked and slashed my way through a few different types of enemies and tons of them. The stages were pretty long (each about fifteen minutes) which gave me plenty of time to experiment with combos. The action was fast-paced and open to combos, but for the majority of the demo I simply button mashed. I was graded at the end for my score and I got an F, really terrible. It seems like the game is going to require a lot of time to master the combat and receive really good scores. Regardless, I had a fun time cutting up bad guys by button mashing.

BloodRayne: Betrayal was super gory. As I cut through bad guys, blood would fly everywhere. And when they were stunned, I could suck their blood to refill my health bar, a very cool feature. I enjoyed plowing through my enemies, even though I wasn’t doing it very well. But as I did with Devil May Cry 4, it might be fun to replay to improve my skills. I was surprised at the production values of the game. The graphics and the soundtrack were really good, as was the combat. It seems like a really intense side-scrolling hack and slash game. It was developed by WayForward and published by Majesco for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network last week.