Back in the early 2000s, I remember BloodRayne being one of the earliest titles available on the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. And I’ll admit that the character Rayne definitely had me with a stiff joystick when I saw her in advertisements. Granted, I was in middle school at the time, but I never actually spent my money on the game back then. I noticed a revamped version was available on the Nintendo Switch eShop, so I decided to give it a chance — and boy, did I regret that.

Calling this a remake is REALLY dishonest. All they seem to have done is make sure the game looks okay on a 4K television. It doesn’t really look much different than it did nearly 25 years ago.

Especially the in-game graphics outside of the cutscenes — this honestly looks like something the Sega Dreamcast could easily have run. Early titles on a console sometimes suffer from growing pains of technology, and it’s painfully obvious here.

The first level is set in classical Cajun Country, Louisiana. Apparently, Rayne is a half-vampire, but that doesn’t really affect the story or her powers in any meaningful way. But for some reason, water harms her more than zombies or bullets — which makes absolutely no sense to me.

While the controls aren’t perfect and the graphics are pretty bad, I actually enjoyed the first bit of this game.

You can either attack enemies by draining their blood like a true vampire, slash them with her arm blades, or use firearms you find from enemies. At first, this combat style is fairly decent — though a bit clunky — especially as time marches on.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was this boss. It was the first real one in the game — incredibly fast, overpowered, and I was surrounded by water that was hurting me even more. I ended up realizing this game had a cheat code system, and that was the only way I got past it.

Not long after, I was in a completely different level set in Argentina, fighting World War II–era Germans who were somehow were preparing for autumn of 1945.

But these German levels didn’t help me enjoy the game any more. I actually liked it a lot less as I wandered through bland corridor after corridor trying to figure out where to go. Eventually, I just didn’t have any motivation to keep playing. I also learned that this game hadn’t gotten great reviews back in the day — and neither did its sequel. It really seems the game’s legacy and popularity rest mostly on the fact that its heroine was a sexy redheaded half-vampire.