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Vampire Rain Hands-On

It was a dark and bloody night...but we still managed to check out this horror shooter for the Xbox 360.

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The Japanese development house Artoon is perhaps best known in the US for developing the Blinx games that were intended to show off the power of the original Xbox. More recently, it acted as codeveloper of Blue Dragon, the Xbox 360 role-playing game that's more commonly associated with Hironobu Sakaguchi's Mistwalker Studios. However, while working on that game (which is set to be released in the US by the end of the summer), Artoon also managed to develop a stealth-oriented shooter called Vampire Rain, which recently went gold and is about to hit store shelves. We recently got the chance to play a preview build of the game and came out with these impressions.

Occasionally, your teammates will help you take down incoming vampires.
Occasionally, your teammates will help you take down incoming vampires.

Imagine Sam Fisher hunting vampires, and you'll have a good idea of what you're going to get out of Vampire Rain. In the game, you play as Lloyd, a member of an elite antivampire special forces team that's been sent into a suburb of Los Angeles. Lloyd is well known in the American Information Bureau as the only survivor of a vampire attack on his base five years ago. Now, with the help of a few squadmates, he's tasked with entering LA and taking down one of the higher-ups in the vampire organization. However, the assassination mission quickly goes to hell during the first few missions of the game because the advance team that was supposed to be scouting for you drops out of contact. Instead of proceeding with your mission, you're tasked with scouting the city for its location.

Like the fictional town of Sunnydale in the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, LA in Vampire Rain acts as the host to a large array of vampires and a number of normal citizens who are apparently too stupid to be scared away by the fact that their friends are periodically found in back alleys with their bodies completely drained of blood. Unfortunately for Lloyd, the entire game apparently takes place in the middle of a rainy night, so there's no chance of sunlight coming along to wipe the streets clean, leaving him with little except his wits and his guns to protect himself against the vampire hordes.

The Splinter Cell reference above is appropriate because you definitely don't want to treat this game as an action-laden shooter. In fact, for the first hour or two of the game, the result of any encounter with a vampire will result in a quick death; your guns will mostly just annoy them. They're also too quick and strong to avoid if they spot you because they are capable of jumping to the top of a building or over a 15-foot fence to get to you.

Your only hope in these early hours is a healthy dose of sneaking around. If you spot people, you can use your necrovision to determine if they're a vampire or a civilian; if they're one of the undead, their vision cone will subsequently be displayed on your minimap, Metal Gear Solid-style. You also get a flashing warning on your screen whenever a Nightwalker (which is what the game calls vampires) spots you. If you get under cover quickly enough, that Nightwalker will forget about you. But if you stay exposed, you'll see a big red "Detected!" sign pop up, which basically means that you should expect to reload your game a few seconds afterward.

For the first hour or so of the game, you'll find yourself roaming the streets and rooftops of LA, attempting to avoid the attention of the Nightwalkers that roam the city. Because your assassination mission is on pause, you quickly get retasked to other jobs, such as destroying a cell phone transmitter that the vamps are using to communicate with each other. To do so, you'll need to make use of the full Sam Fisher move set, such as mantling over obstacles, creeping along ledges, hanging off of handholds and moving with your arms, sliding along zip lines, or rappelling from anchor points.

The vampires of LA don't take kindly to traffic violations.
The vampires of LA don't take kindly to traffic violations.

Luckily, as you proceed in your mission, you'll find new tools that will enable you to attack vampires and succeed in killing them. You'll eventually unlock a sniper rifle that can pop the head off of a Nightwalker from long range, instantly killing it. You'll also wind up nabbing an ultraviolet light-powered knife that will let you instantly kill a vampire if you manage to sneak up behind it. These weapons are somewhat implausibly littered around town, on the rooftops and in the alleyways, so it's a wonder that the townsfolk didn't pick them up to end the Nightwalker problem long ago.

There's one thing we can say for sure about Vampire Rain: It's not for the unskilled. We spent as much time reloading our game and returning to the scenes of our deaths as we did actually playing, so you can expect a good challenge when you try out the full game for yourself. It's scheduled to hit in early July, so stay tuned to GameSpot for a full review in the coming weeks.

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