Vampires…Rain…Vampire Rain!
Sometimes you can just tell so much about a game, or at least get a powerful first impression, from its opening menu and cutscenes. Case in point would be Vampire Rain; the low quality cutscenes at the start put the player in the shoes of John Lloyd, your typical young adult spec ops guy. His appearance is half Sam Fisher, half Solid Snake, but never mind that. As Lloyd, you’re part of an elite secret commando squad that is run by the AIB, American Information Bureau, or something generic like that. The rest of your team is as generic as you could ever hope for: the large, deep voice, heavy gunning squad leader, the female sniper, and the goofy tech guy rounds out this bunch.
Your mission? Eliminate Nightwalkers, i.e., the vampires whose population has gone out of check by locating a support team and taking out the beast that spawns these things. In fact, there are only 908 days left until the Nightwalkers overtake the human population completely, according to one of the silly opening cutscenes. Also according to the story, anyone that’s gone missing in the last one hundred years was either eaten or turned into a Nightwalker, which could be why the Nightwalkers appear as normal humans until they spot you and transform.
The mission begins on a rainy night in an incredibly bland and generic urban environment. It’s almost completely abandoned with the exception of a few humans and of course several Nightwalkers; you can tell the difference by using your Necrovision, which is part of your monocle – if the person in question turns red, this is a Nightwalker. It’s a pain to have to scan each person, so you may as well treat all of them as Nightwalkers and just proceed with caution. Getting back to the environment, it’s embarrassingly bland; sharp edges, low res textures, nearly every aspect of it being just a flat, solid object with no interaction. There are of course some dumpsters and pipes and things that you can climb on, and a few convenient wires setup for zip-lining from one rooftop to another, however. What’s perhaps the worst aspect of the environment are the many invisible walls you will encounter as you try to avoid the heinous Nightwalkers.
Nightwalkers; Dumb, But Dangerous
Nightwalkers are really stupid; once you tag one with Necrovision, you can view its field of view on your mini-map, and you can see that these guys don’t have a great field of view, and many of them don’t even move, they just stare. However, Nightwalkers do react to sounds, and other disturbances like a flock of birds flying away when you get close, and they’ll react. You know when you’ve been spotted by a pair of eyes appearing in the middle of the screen, and I thought this effect was kind of neat. If you see this, you need to immediately get out of their field of view, or you’re almost surely dead. The Nightwalker transforms and then it’s basically game over: they may be stupid, but they’re really overpowered. Nightwalkers can leap on top of buildings from the ground, they can run really fast, and they kill you in two hits; well, one hit really. Once hit by a Nightwalker, Lloyd hits the turf and the Nightwalker simply hits you once more time and bam, game over. You have to skip the stupid death animation that just goes to show how bad the graphics are, and then you spawn back at whatever checkpoint you hit last to try things again. I should mention that you are armed, and ammo does magical appear throughout the environment, but the Nightwalkers are still really tough. With the standard assault rifle, you have to pump nearly a full mag, thirty rounds into a Nightwalker to bring it down, and this is only possibly if you have the Nightwalker from a distance; if they’re close at all forget it, they run right into the bullets as though nothing is hitting them and if they get close they’ll do their infamous 1,2 kill attack.
Oh, There’s More
As the AI is so dumb and keeping in mind the entire experience is extremely linear for a stealth game – it’s really only a matter of time before you figure out how to navigate past the Nightwalkers safely, but sticking with it until that long, or even longer, is no small challenge because playing Vampire Rain just feels like a chore. Trying to take it online in one of several standard multiplayer modes (too bad co-op wasn’t one of them, that could have maybe been fun?) including CTF, Deathmatch, and a mode where some players are Nightwalkers and others are the commandos. Regardless, finding a working multiplayer game should have been a Trophy; in the several attempts I made to find a game, or even host one, I either saw no games or just a couple, one in Japan even. Having read online, I wasn’t the only one that experienced this, and even when trying to join a game, they never get started or simply time out with an error message; not encouraging to say the least.
Safe To Pass
Vampire Rain was a very bad game over a year ago on the 360, and it’s still forgettable on the PS3. There are dozens of other great games coming out this time of year that easily trump this one, and I strongly recommend gamers refrain from buying this one.