Atrocious. Awful. Appalling. Inexcusable. Terrible. Horrendous. Dreadful. Abysmal.
Get the point?
Vampire Rain is one nightmare of the game. After spending a few hours with this game, I asked myself the question, “what does this game do right?” I couldn’t answer my own question. It is hard to see what is entertaining about this game when there are so many things wrong.
You play as Lloyd, a bland Solid Snake/Sam Fisher rip-off. Using a third person perspective, players sneak around a vampire infested city targeting host vampires. Once the host dies, all other vampires that stemmed from it will perish. The word “rain” is used in the title because supposedly rain weakens vampire’s senses, making it easier to attack them, however, I did not see any difference because no matter what you do, you will die if you are spotted. Like any action/stealth game, there are a few firearms available. But unless there is a mile long hallway between you and a vampire, there is no way to kill them. The handgun is absolutely worthless as there is no way to take down an enemy. Even using the “vampire vision,” a kind of night vision feature that determines who is a vampire and who is human, does not work well because you have about 10 seconds of battery life and it takes like 8 seconds to register the vampire. The game’s balancing is entirely thrown off in every department.
The first stage acts as a basic tutorial. From this first impression, it seems like the player is free to roam in a large city, killing vampires at will. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Using guns as a breadcrumb trail, the player must jump and climb from rooftop to rooftop without being seen. But why are there just guns laying around? I mean, this is a city where people live and there are just random munitions just lying all over the place?
If a vampire does see you, you will die. It is all or nothing. There is no way to survive a vampire attack. There is no way to escape. To make matters even more awkward, the vampire running animation is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever seen. I have seen amateur made gifs on the web that look 100 times better than the animation in this game. And speaking of animated gifs, the water/rain effects are a laughable two frames of animation.
Even before you are able to play the game, you have to wait for a painful 25 minute install. Why does this game have to install into my PS3 harddrive when it has graphics worse than early PS2 games? Then the player has to wait through a bunch of initial loading screens, sit through the game’s intro cutscene, then play through the hand holding first tutorial level. I mean, I didn’t even use my gun until for over an hour since the game first entered my PS3 hardware. A game’s intro level should grab the player by the balls to grab their attention. Just look at games like God of Water or the intro movie to any Final Fantasy game. Even the later stages in the game are atrocious, making you jump on dumpsters to reach a rooftop, to walk to the other side, to jump back down again. There is no action, no satisfaction in this game. I was always waiting for this game to “start.”
The thing is, I could go on and on about how bad this game is. But I am going to stop this review here because I do not want it to receive any more recognition. Everything about this game sucks. About 90% of PS2 games look better than this, I heard much better music and sound effects on the NES, and the gameplay is so slow and unbalanced I actually have more fun vacuuming my house. There should be a restraining order against this game: it is not to come within 1 mile of any PS3 system. Stay away.
The following is a list of things that have a higher entertainment value than playing Vampire Rain: Alter Species:
-Eat Maggots
-Poke yourself in the eye
-Holding “it” for a full day
-Chug a six pack of Code Red Mountain Dew
-Play E.T. on Atari
-Getting tortured on a Japanese game show
-Choke yourself with your own scrotum
