Vampire Rain Review

Very few games give you a chance to learn another language. I now know that in Japanese ‘Vampire’ means ‘sucks’ and ‘Rain’ means ‘balls’. Hold onto your butts, here is my review of Vampire Rain.

Question: What does doing your taxes, passing a kidney stone, and finding out ‘she’ is actually a ‘he’ have in common? Answer: All are more fun than playing Vampire Rain.

The line between genius and insanity is very thin. Never has this been truer than in Vampire Rain. Vampires have overrun an entire city, and are on the verge of taking over the world. It is up to you, Jake Lloyd, special operative of an unnamed generic task force, to infiltrate this city, discover the vampire’s weakness and kill them, saving all humanity. Be swift, you only have one rainy night to do so! For rain interferes with their bat-like sonar, giving you the chance to slip by unnoticed. Combining Sam Fisher and vampires could have been utter genius; instead it simply creates a game which will drive you insane.

The game’s mechanics are shamelessly taken from Splinter Cell, with a dash of Metal Gear Solid thrown in. You control Jake just as you would Sam Fisher, the only difference being the radar used in MGS is sometimes available, giving you vision cones to avoid. The problem with this mechanic is it’s not entirely reliable, as vampires don’t always automatically register on your radar. You have to sit still, switch to heat vision, wait for the vampire to be targeted, see where he’s looking, then maneuver around his cone. Problems with this: 1) Sometimes vampire placement seems entirely random, and you’ll replay certain segments wondering where the hell you were spotted from. 2) Vampire vision is very irregular. Some can see you from way off, out of your radar’s range, while others have no peripheral vision at all, allowing you to literally walk to the front right/left of them. Even more puzzling is that sometimes the mission path will require you to do so.

Even though Sam…er…Jake is packing heat don’t even bother shooting anything other than the occasional breakable lock. Vampires are short of invincible, and it’ll take more than a full clip to bring them down. The problem with this is that vampires are protected by incredible speed, unimaginable strength (they kill you with one hit), and clunky aiming controls. Once spotted you might as well put the controller down and watch the death scene, as running or fighting is futile.

You’ll see this a lot. Followed by ‘Game Over’.

The missions are nothing more than A to B obstacle courses – only you don’t know how to reach B or where the obstacles are. Imagine a game of minesweeper that has only one map and no numbers hinting where the next mine is. The level designers must have thought this was an enormous amount of fun. I didn’t. Trial and error is simply the only way to complete some missions. You HAVE to die. How is that fun? Missions play out like this: Mission Start, go right, go left, get killed by vampire. Mission Start, go right, go right, go straight, go left, get killed by vampire. Mission Start, go right, go right…Fortunately mediocre boss battles are spaced between the soul sucking labyrinths, so there is some variety.

Vampire Rain is a feast for the eyes…if you haven’t played a game in the last ten years. Graphically it looks like a high-resolution version of Winback for the PS2, which in turn was a high-resolution version of Winback for the N64. Using the magic of the transitive property Vampire Rain looks like a high-resolution version of a game that came out for the N64. It animates about as well. Vampires have three different animations: standing still, walking, and running. The derivative, repetitive, and lackluster environments drive the point home – this is not a pretty game.

Yeah, it really looks this good.

What I find most troubling about this game is the A.I…or the complete lack of. Every vampire in this game must have taken the short bus to school. About 80% of the vampires stand perfectly still, making it clear that this is nothing more than an obstacle course, waiting for you to walk into their cone. The others follow predictable routes. As soon as Jake is spotted the vampires recognize you are not one of them, and attack you. The thing that totally blew my mind, and took away any suspension of disbelief I had, was the fact that not every enemy in the game is a vampire. Occasionally there will be humans standing around close to, and in line of sight of, vampires. When you target them with your heat vision they show up as green, friendly, so they pose no threat to you…but they’ll be standing right next to other vampires and won’t be attacked! How is this an intelligent game design? How is this intelligent at all?

At least there’s a multi-player component to this game, right? When you’ve finished the excruciatingly long campaign you can go duke it out online. Thankfully finding a game is troublesome, proving people are smart enough not to play this, keeping the suffering at a minimum. Online you can choose to be either a soldier or a vampire, but given the extreme advantage vampires have, why would you ever choose to play as a sheep against a wolf?

I’ll end on an optimistic note. Given the audacity to charge 60 dollars for this horrendous game, here are other, more entertaining alternatives:

1. Buy all three Blade movies.
2. Spend 60 dollars on themes and gamer pictures.
3. Pay someone 60 dollars to bite you in the neck.
4. Get 60 one-dollar bills, and burn them individually.

I suffered for 20+ hours to complete this game. Please don’t let it have been in vain. Avoid.

Gameplay: They’re called games because they’re fun. This isn’t.
Controls: Clunky, imprecise, the least of this game’s problems.
Graphics: Hey, you took your PS2 out to play some games? That’s the 360? Oh…
Sound: Mute the game and read the subtitles out loud. It’ll sound better.
Replay: Sadly the campaign is long, and there are a lot of extra missions to unlock.
Overall: Do you really not know yet?

Posted by: Thrillhouse17 on July 19th, 2007