Vampire Rain Demo Impressions

I think will be my last negative post for a while before I discuss more pleasant subjects, like the Overlord demo and fluffy kittens.

I posted about this game last week to mercilessly blast its crummy graphics. Little did I know they released the demo that same day, as if challenging me to look beyond the superficial and find beauty in the gameplay. Well, did I find it?

Bite the jump to get my take on the Vampire Rain demo...

Vampire Rain plays like a confused mash-up of survival horror and stealth. The demo offers up 5 short, single-player missions and the option for multiplayer matches over Live. I was able to try out 3 of the single-player missions. Based solely on my experiences there, I can confidently say that this game is headed in the wrong direction.

You play a guy who looks very much like Sam Fisher, only with half the mojo. See, instead of getting the jump on unsuspecting terrorists, you are facing off against a brood of vampires (referred to oh-so-creatively as Nightwalkers). These are deadly, deadly blood suckers. You have a health bar that regenerates when you're out of combat but it's primarily for show. Once you are detected and a vampire gets within striking range, nothing can save you except a couple blasts from the shotgun.

Sadly, you are not equipped with the shotgun in every mission. Instead you are outfitted with a pistol and rifle that do wonders for blowing the dust off a vampire's lapel, but little more. Fine, this is clearly a game of stealth, not a run & gun extravaganza. Unfortunately for us, this is where the demo suffers the most. The stealth mechanics are horribly basic and are provided little support by the uninspired level design. Forget light and noise meters. The enemy AI feels very scripted, making the stealth portions simply a matter of waiting for all vampires to leave a room before entering it yourself.

Sometime you don't even have to do that. The first mission in the demo sees you clambering atop one nondescript rooftop after another. While it is a decent way to introduce the controls to the player, I almost quit the demo entirely from the crushing boredom I was experiencing.

The shallow stealth gameplay, coupled with the brutal consequences of being detected, do make Vampire Rain play more like a survival horror game than anything else. There are some tense moments to be sure, but the mood is constantly ruined by the lackluster production values. As I mentioned already, the graphics stink. The textures are extremely bland, as is the lighting and map design. The only thing they nailed with some success is the look of falling rain at night. I should also mention that the cutscenes are poorly animated, poorly directed and are voiced by some pretty bad actors.

Bad-mouthing a demo like this is almost pointless since it's a free download. I hope that I can spare some of you the 800+ megabyte download. Conserve your Xbox's life and put it to more meaningful use than downloading and running this sorry excuse for a 360 game.