Vampire Rain Re-Review

[Brianemone]

Jimbo has taken it on himself to play some of the worst rating games from the current consoles and see if they really are as bad as people say.

Vampire Rain. According to gamerankings.com it is rated at 39% and the 3^rd worst game on xbox 360. Does it deserve this? Is it really that bad? That is what I set out to find out.

After renting the game out for a week, I begrudgingly sat down to play it, the taunts and jokes of many an internet forum lurking in my head. The game opens with some chick getting wasted by a vampire (oh no wait, they are called nightwalkers in Vampire Rain), which is alright I guess, graphics of the cutscene look alright, nothing that couldn’t be done last gen though. I get to the menu screen to face a minimalist, green, sam fisher-esque layout. Ok, new game on normal difficulty.

If you had to judge the game by the cutscene before mission 1, you would have to say that this is pretty fucking terrible game. For one, the mouth movements don’t match the dialogue being said, although it should be noted that this was a Japanese developed game, if wikipedia is correct. The second thing you’ll notice is that the voice acting is horrendous. The delivery is stiff and is clearly not done by professionals. This becomes blatantly obvious in some later cutscenes but I’ll get to that soon. The third thing you’ll notice from this cutscene is that the script is awful. Some of the dialogue lends itself to describing situations which the player can clearly figure out for themselves, the developers must’ve thought the players would be retarded school drop outs. Let me illustrate an example. At the end of mission 1 you are trying to get to a rendevous point to meet another team. This is clearly spelled out throughout the entire mission. You get to the end zone and a cutscene occurs. Take a guess at the first fucking thing to come out of the dipshit captains mouth….

“This is the rendezvous point….but there’s no-one here!”

Yeah, no fucking shit Sherlock. Jeez, who writes this tripe. The whole mission I have been told to get to this rendezvous point to meet with the other team, I can clearly see that no-one is there, and I know it’s the rendezvous point, so why have this pointless piece of dialogue? The whole game is rife with situations like above and with terrible voice acting it’s a one, two punch to the groin.

Moving on to the actual game. Controls seem responsive and everything does what it should so that’s a plus. Or so I thought, until you get to pressing up against a wall. Press Lb to flatten against the wall solid snake style, that works. Shimmy to the end of the wall to sneak a peak around the corner, that doesn’t work. The shimmy action is so slow it takes about 5 mins to shimmy to the end of the wall. Also, the game seems to selectively choose which surfaces you can press against. Cars lining the street? No chance, even some walls that I should be able to press against denied me that delightful opportunity. Man this is only the first mission and it’s off to a terrible start. I decide to take out my gun to shoot some civilians, you know, for shits and giggles and all that. GAME OVER. Ok, I'm not allowed to shoot civilians then. To determine whether someone is a nightwalker or not you have to use your necrovision in the goggles on your head. This highlights nightwalkers as red and civilians as green. The other function of the goggles is night vision. Flip that on and I noticed a little “charge” bar in the top left of the screen. What the fuck is this shit? The bar is going down really fast. I timed it and it seems you can only use your goggles for 17sec continuously before having to recharge. What? This must be really B grade equipment then, luckily, you really don’t need to use it all that much in the game.

You get to see your first nightwalker in the second mission. This must be some zombie/vampire crossbreed cause these sure as shit don’t look like vampires. Their movement when not attacking you is a zombie type shuffle with their arms held up around their chest like some retarded praying mantis. Supposedly I should sneak around this nightwalker, fuck that, im not throwing away my years of shooting virtual shit for nothing. Pull out my pistol and fire away. This is the point where the game goes from being bad to being fucking terrible. The pistol takes off a tiny fraction of the night walkers health before it comes over and kills me in 2 hits. Count em, 2 hits. In fact, it should really be only one hit because the nightwalkers slash you which knocks you on the ground. They then proceed to kick you which finishes your character off. Unbelievable. 1 hit kills. This game is HARDCORE. I tried a couple more times to kill this nightwalker with my pistol before giving up, it was pretty much impossible to do. The game seems to stress to you not to engage the night walkers and to sneak around them. Yes, that is the goal of games like metal gear and splinter cell. But at least in those games when you get caught you can fend for your self rather than getting ravaged by some retarded zompire (yeah, I just made that up). Later on you get an automatic rifle. This can actually kill the night walkers……if you’re standing about 500m away from them. It is just as ineffective as the pistol and take off slightly more health. Might as well take all the weapons out of this game, because they really do jack shit all damage. That is, except for the sniper rifle. But even then unless you get a head shot, you can kiss your sorry ass goodbye.

In my earlier discussion on how I was going to write these articles, Brianemone said I should try to find other funny stuff to do in the game. The problem is this game offers no such opportunity. The game world is bland and painfully boring that there is literally nothing to do apart from play through the missions. This game is simply devoid of any fun, and in turn becomes a boring experience. The only thing I could think of that was any fun at all was pretending that my character in game was playing vampire rain and then committing suicide by jumping off the tallest buildings. Pretty heavy, huh?

Wow, this article is getting kinda long, I’ll try to wrap up. I didn’t get a chance to try multiplayer as, surprise, surprise, no sessions found. The game just flat out sucks. I wouldn’t go as far to say it is the worst game ever but it is definitely a terrible, terrible game. It is a shame because it is a concept that could’ve worked, but somehow they fucked it up through unbalanced enemies and boring gameplay. Some people, you know who you are, tempted fate by considering buying this when it was $15 at gpstore, just to see if it really was as bad as people say. NO, just no. That’s like eating dog shit to see if it tastes like dog shit. You know it’s going to, so spare yourself the embarrassment of having this game in your game list and just avoid it. If you get it as a gift or as a prize, the recommendations below should hopefully give you more enjoyment out of the game than actually playing it.

Jimbo. OUT.

5 things you could do with your vampire rain disc:

1. Use it as a Frisbee with your kids.
2. A shiny new coaster for your coffee table
3. Break it in half and challenge a hobo to a DVD/knife fight
4. Give to your parents/ grandparents to scare away birds from their garden.
5. A new Christmas tree decoration