Vampire Rain [X360]

Vampires might as well be invincible in Vampire Rain, because the only time I've ever killed one was with the help of my squad mates, and that was part of a scripted event, so I don't think it counts. I've tried attacking up-close, I've tried attacking from afar, and I've tried everything in-between. Either I suck, or the game is completely unbalanced; not to brag or anything, but I'm rather certain the latter option is the case.

Hard-to-kill enemies are nothing new to videogames, but it is Vampire Rain's refusal to allow players any chance to fight back that is this scenario's most aggravating feature. The first time a Nightwalker strikes Lloyd, he goes down, stunned. Worse than stunned, actually, as I've seen poor Lloyd get caught in midair, clip through walls, and fall through the ground. But the point is, he's stunned, unable to fight back in any capacity, making him easy prey for the undead's second blow--which always kills the player. It would be nice to be given a chance, even a small one, to attempt escape, since retaliation never seems to work.

But that's okay, right? After all, if the vampires are stupid to the point that they'll hardly see the players snooping about, there's no need to worry about confrontations, anyway. So everything's fine. Wrong. While most of the environments tend to be large, the paths from start to finish are extremely linear. There's usually one path to get to any certain area, and in this modern age of stealth games where user choice is king, this adds yet another fatal flaw to Vampire Rain's impressive rogues' gallery of bad game design. Because of the game's prolific linearity, trial-and-error gameplay rears its ugly head all too often, making for lots of frustrating continues and restarts.

One instance placed me in an alleyway, sandwiched between a fence too high to jump and a large building. Proceeding forward, a Nightwalker exited the building, immediately saw me, and killed me before I could futilely draw a gun and fire. Trying again, I took a long route around the building, skipping the alleyway entirely, crept past two undead, and began to spring through an empty parking lot to a street--only to hit an invisible wall with an onscreen message informing me that I was trying to move past the level's parameters. Okay. I then returned to the alleyway, sprinted past the Nightwalker as he exited the building onto the street, only to again smack into an invisible barrier. I finally tried climbing on top of a dumpster next to the door from which the vampire emerges then scaling higher until I got to the roof. It took way too long, and again, the lack of user choice sucked what little fun the game actually contained.

Many such instances wouldn't be nearly as frustrating if the controls would actually respond occasionally. Aiming with a gun is downright sluggish, though really, trying to attack enemies is a waste of time. My biggest gripe comes with attempting to sidle along walls, a necessary tactic in any stealth game. The appropriate button, the L bumper, seemed to be shut off in some instances, as even when I all but humped a flat surface, Lloyd wouldn't flatten against it.

Multiplayer continues Vampire Rain's trend of mediocrity and imbalance. Typical modes such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flame--a flame instead of a flag; get it?--are available, as is Death or Nightwalker, a game mode in which one player gets to become an undead after being fragged. Of course, the undead player then has access to the over-balancing which makes the single-player portion of Vampire Rain so frustrating. Certain undead statistics such as movement speed and power can be modified, but the latter can only be lowered to the point where humans are killed in three hits instead of two. A team-based version of Death or Nightwalker is available as well, but just as with any other portion of the game, why even bother? None of the available modes feature anything that isn't available in any other shooter ever made, and almost any other game probably executes tried and true modes such as Deathmatch better than Vampire Rain ever could.''

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