BloodRayne 2

Every room is a murder machine waiting for someone to aim a body at it. Ceiling fans, meat hooks, electrical junctions, spiked railings, sunlight itself — Terminal Reality built the 2004 sequel around the idea that the most interesting weapon in Rayne's arsenal is the architecture, and gave her a harpoon to drag enemies into it. Killing a thug with the arm blades earns a little. Suspending him over a whirring industrial fan earns a lot more, and the game keeps score.

That scoring feeds the dhampir's other appetite. Draining blood refills health and charges up abilities, so combat settles into a rhythm of crowd control, grapple, hard kill, feed. Blood Rage slows time and tints the world red; Blood Flame and the other unlockable powers arrive slowly enough that the mid-game genuinely opens up. It is a more deliberate fighting system than the first game's run-and-slice, and when it clicks — a knot of enemies pulled off a catwalk one by one — it has a cruel comic timing that few brawlers of the era managed.

The trouble is everything between the fights. Platforming across pipes and ledges with a camera that never quite agrees with you, in a gothic-industrial cityscape that leans hard on brown and bruise-purple, wears thin well before the last chapter. The PS2 version runs at a noticeably rougher frame rate than the PC build and the lighting that made the whole look cohere is thinner here. Boss encounters tend toward pattern memorisation rather than the improvisation the combat engine can support.

It also arrived at the tail end of the moment when marketing a game on its heroine's body still seemed like a strategy, and the tone has aged the least gracefully of anything in it. Strip the promotional noise away, though, and what remains is a designer's toy: a combat space where you are constantly reading a room for what can be used to kill. Very few action games of the generation asked that question, and almost none answered it with this much enthusiasm for the mess.

Play it for two or three hours and you stop looking at enemies and start looking at ceilings.