Sometimes, a game comes along with such a brilliantly simple concept you wonder why nobody else thought of it first. In this case it’s Splinter Cell with vampires, and it’s rubbish.
You see, Vampire Rain is a game that’s been almost universally panned by reviewers across the world, citing among their complaints a poor story, poor graphics, derivative gameplay and a reliance on trial and error mixed with a frustratingly high difficulty level. The first two complaints are valid, but the rest range from being exaggerated to being way, way off the mark.
Let’s start with that story though. It seems the good old US of A is being steadily overrun with the vampiric “Nightwalkers”, undead hordes borne from the reanimated corpses of their victims. This no doubt misunderstood race can run like the wind, leap tall buildings and kill a man with two swipes of their claws. Most weapons are next to useless against them, and with nuclear strikes being a somewhat undesirable solution the only option left is stealth, which is where you come in. You play one member of a small team of Sam Fisher cosplayers, tasked with a night-long mission that escalates into a quest to kill the resident “Prime Walkers”, whose death will result in the further destruction of all their subservient beasts. It’s full of horror game clichés, including the classic “missing B team” shocker, but it provides a decent enough basis for the action, which is much better.
Most missions boil down to simply travelling from one part of the map to another, a task greatly complicated by those pesky nightwalkers. Should they see you, you’ll be dead in seconds, which is where the “trial and error” criticism rears its head. In reality there’s an easy way to avoid this problem. Don’t get seen! You have at your disposal a “necrovision” scope, which is basically a vampire detector. Keep a vampire in its sights for a few seconds and you’re rewarded with a permanent marker in your radar, complete with a Metal Gear Solid style vision cone. With this in mind, all the game asks of you is that you be methodical. You need to sneak up to every corner, hug the walls and use every vantage point as an opportunity to pinpoint your foes, before sneaking past them all through each deceptively linear cityscape. Death is only ever a result of your own carelessness, and is always avoidable as long as you play the way the game wants you to.
Unfortunately though, Vampire Rain suffers when it stretches itself away from the urban stealth at its core. Outside, the prevalent darkness and rain creates a fittingly oppressive atmosphere, and also goes some way to hiding the inadequacies of the game’s graphics. In the harsh, artificial light of the game’s internal environments though, all those problems are brought into harsh relief. What’s more, the enclosed environments do a terrible job of disguising their painfully linear layouts, resorting to half-arsed obstacles and conveniently locked doors blocking alternate routes.
The other troublesome issue involves the game’s sporadic combat, where you get the rare chance to handle the sniper rifle and shotgun. Both weapons can kill a nightwalker with a single shot, which is fine, but you can’t help but wonder why you’re not allowed to hold on to them permanently in place of your useless pistol and assault rifle. Why bother with dangerous stealth tactics when you could just snipe everything from the rooftops? Luckily you do get to use them when facing the Prime Walkers though, all of which make for some of the worst boss battles I have ever had the misfortune to endure. It’s generally a bad idea to throw in boss fights in most genres, so the decision to include them in a stealth title beggars belief.
For all its problems though, Vampire Rain is actually highly enjoyable when doing what it does best. All it asks of you is a little patience, a little suspension of disbelief, and the willpower to trudge through those atrocious boss fights. It’s not a great game, or even a good one on the whole, but there are worse. Like Superman 64?
Graphics | Audio | Gameplay | Replay | Genre | Final |
