"It's a rainin' crap"

Vampire Rain is a third person stealth action title. In the vain of Metal Gear Solid or even Splinter cell. The game was hated by critics and gamers alike yet for some reason I was drawn to the title. Maybe it was just the vampire theme.

A military ops team has vanished and your team has been sent out to find them. The catch is that the streets are filled with the undead and they want your blood. Solve this mystery and... Oh hell, the plot is paper thin. It's far from interesting and I can sit here and lie about how it goes somewhere but from what I actually played it goes no where worth exploring. The characters are two dimensional and worthless.

The game does feature some snazzy visuals but they won't make your jaw drop. Besides the CGI stuff the games rain effect is rather nicely done. Otherwise the game uses uninteresting character designs, mainly the vampires which look more zombies. The locations lack texture and come off as being rather plain to look at.

If you thought old school anime had some bad voice dubs then wait until you see what this game has to offer. I think I lasted only 15 sentences into the game before I lost it and almost fell out of my chair at how bad the voice acting was and how terrible the script was. Just atrocious. The game felt like it never knew when it wanted to have music cued as it seemed to jump in and out randomly with no real reason behind it. Music itself felt generic and didn't give a stealth feel or a vampire is trying to kill me feel. Sound effects also did nothing for me. A noise sounds when you're spotted, vampire's growl and your gun fires very unrealistically.

Control in the game is rather easy to get the hang of. X button brings your gun up and down. Y alters your stance. B interacts with objects. The d-pad is used for goggles and stuff, ala Splinter Cell. R trigger fires while L trigger changes weapons. Very easy to get the hang of.

Vampire Rain is a game that just can't decide what it wants to be and by doing so it creates problems for itself. On one hand we have an interesting stealth game. Vampires will rape your soul in two hits. This means you can not be spotted at all or you die. Plain and simple. This causes tension and you'll find yourself hunting the streets and locations for alternate paths that don't intercept with any vampires.

It's easy to not only spot a vampire on your radar but it also shows where they are looking. Sometimes that doesn't really help as they can see outside of their cone of vision. This really makes the game feel cheap at times and can get very frustrating when you just can't figure out what to do.

As you advance in the game you gain a UV gun which hurts the vampires and allows for you to not always have to find an alternate route. The catch is that it varies how many shots. Some vampires take just 5 shots to die so you will kill them before they reach you. But on the other hand it can take up to 15 shots from your UV gun and you will most likely die. Problem is that you can't tell which vampire will take however many shots.

The game is friendly enough to offer a fair amount of checkpoints. But the game also suffers from random loading screens which are a painful black screen that says now loading. This really breaks up the flow of the game and with so little content going on between these sections it's hard to imagine why the game even needs to keep loading.

Besides a slightly long story mode (everything is broken up into missions) the game also offers on-line play. From what I can gather most find the on-line to be mediocre at best, worth getting achievements but nothing else. Problem is that I tried for over an hour to get into a game and I either couldn't find one or the session would time out. That's rather sad for a game that is only a few months old.

Vampire Rain is a terrible game. Not because it tries something different but because it fails at making it interesting. What's a cool idea is destroyed by awkward game play mechanics that change on a whim. It causes the game to feel broken and unpolished. The fact that on-line is also dead is a problem as that takes away any real life the game had going for it as I pretty much found the single player to be an almost unplayable carbon copy of Splinter Cell.

Story - 3/10
Graphics - 7/10
Sound - 3/10
Control - 8/10
Game Play - 4/10
Replay Value - 2/10

Final Score - 3/10

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/11/07

Game Release: Vampire Rain (US, 07/03/07)