Vampire Rain
July 16,2007 - From AQ Interactive comes Vampire Rain, the most compelling game of the year! Take control of stealth agent Lloyd as you fight your way through vampire after vampire, referred to as Nightwalkers, as you struggle to free Los Angeles, CA of the Nightwalkers. It’s filled with excitement, horror, and a fantastic story. All of this is true…if you consider a beaten down version of Splinter Cell mixed with vampires and a major suck factor to be game of the year material. In reality, it’s a horribly executed game with most of its elements being terrible and way, way too much rain.

As mentioned, you are Lloyd, a member of an elite black ops group created by the American Information Bureau (AIB) to investigate the Nightwalker invasion. You’re working in Los Angeles, where the Nightwalkers are assumed to be the ones behind numerous kidnappings and disappearances. The issues have been going on for a while, and as the stereotypical “hard ass” with a past, you’ve been involved the entire time. You work, obviously, with a small band of other stealths: Harrison (your leader), Kelly (squad mate), and Hanson (essentially your communications, etc specialist). With all the rain (mind you, LA never rains like that), you have a bit of an advantage, because the Nightwalkers can’t sense you as well. You go from objective point to objective point performing mostly mind-numbing tasks that will make you want to slam your head through the television just to spur some excitement.

From time to time, you’ll get flashbacks into Lloyd’s past, and there will be some little girl following you around but disappearing right after you see her. The story doesn’t get much better, and the melodramatic style of it gets really annoying. A lot of the time, it sounds like such a forced tough guy act, you’d swear the South Park guys were doing it as a joke.

After watching too much video to start off the game, the first thing you’ll notice is the sub par gameplay. Now, we understand that it is a stealth-based game, but does the character constantly need to move as slowly as he does? A sprint would be nice, especially considering that once a Nightwalker sees you, there’s almost no way to escape it. It takes two hits from one to kill you, but really, it only takes one unless you happen to fall off the side of a building. The first blow is nearly irrecoverable and you’ll be bitten right afterwards. You can try to shoot the blood sucking jerk, but it won’t do you much good unless you are quite a ways away from it. Even then, nearly an entire 30-round clip from a high powered assault rifle are needed to take it down (don’t bother with the pistol, because you might as well be spitting at the damned thing). It’s way too hard to take down one of the creatures, no matter how good of a gamer you are. The only weapons that work well are the sniper rifle, shotgun and UV knife. However, you can only use the knife if you sneak up behind an enemy very carefully. Still, you just can't move well enough to evade a direct battle. It's not quite clunky, just too slow and without enough flow.

None of the game is very scary in the least bit. When a Nightwalker is sensing you, a lame blue vampire face will start to appear on screen and the controller will shake. You’ll want to run for cover because dying is a real pain. Dying is actually the scary part about the game since it’s so hard to kill a Nightwalker. You could be playing for a good 20 or so minutes trying to get to your objective, but that straggler Nightwalker will take you and, and you’re back to where you started. It’s really easy to die, so get used to it, because it will happen often. Thankfully AQ had enough sense to give you an achievement if you are bitten 200 times. Unfortunately, the only other story achievements are for killing 500 Nightwalkers and for finishing the game. And since easy achievements for piss poor games like this make them somewhat worthwhile, it depreciates the game by that much more.

As for the rest of the achievements, you’ll be able to rack them up in multiplayer…if you are able to get into a game. Upon our first twenty or so times trying to play a simple game online, we were met with “game not found” within a couple seconds of trying. Is there really nobody playing anything, not even a deathmatch? Slightly hard to believe, but considering the “quality” of the game, it may not be the biggest stretch. If you manage to be able to play, you’ll be playing a variety of game types, from deathmatches, capture the flame (no, not flag), to destroy. Everything is ok and provides a much better experience that the single player could ever think about mustering, but on the whole it feels too bland for continuous play (unless you’re trying to get achievements).

In the audio and visuals department, Vampire Rain doesn’t bring any “wow” here either. The visuals are ok for a next-gen platform, but there isn’t much detail to the Nightwalkers, as there should be. Instead, they are as simple as can be, because apparently it’s more important to have them appear very urban (prepare yourself to see a vampire with cornrows) instead of looking good on screen. The sound isn’t even that great. It’s decent, but when you’re going inside of the building, the rain could at least fade away instead of just cutting off. Too much of the time, you’ll be hearing absolutely nothing, save for your footsteps and the monotonous rain. The rain isn’t tortuous, just really annoying. AQ could have at least thrown in some decent music for your dull adventure, but they didn’t, so supply your own.

There isn’t too much else to be said about Vampire Rain, other than semi-mindless ranting about how bad the game is (only semi-mindless because you begin coherently, but the ranting consumes too much of you and you might forget what you’re talking about). In a nutshell, Vampire Rain hardly deserves to be written about, much less spoken of. It can’t even be called a disappointment considering there was no hype for this game in the least bit. There is absolutely no reason to buy this game unless you’re essentially insane with too much money to spend. And it’s hardly worth the rental unless you have so much free time on your hands to the point where you need to kill some brain cells. So please, stay far, far away from this game.

Games, News, Reviews, Media and More