This stealth game is very nearly a complete disaster, but here and there shows glimpses of a better game
Mostly functional controls – the plot does some fairly nice things near the end – cool looking rain effects
THE BAD
Stealth mechanics are a joke – extremely ugly visuals – awful gunplay and cover system – terrible enemy animations – being spotted means instant game over – half of your arsenal is completely useless – invisible walls hamper improvisation – story takes too long to get to the point – continuous cutscenes break the pace – mostly corny writing and voice acting – ridiculous AI with easy bosses and impossible normal enemies
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Few games have been universally panned by both press and public like AQ Interactive's Vampire Rain, a stealth-action hybrid which "borrows" heavily from cornerstones of the genre such as Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell. Quotes are in order here, since the game doesn't quite borrow ideas, rather rips them off entirely and despite the results being almost completely disastrous it isn't entirely devoid of redeeming qualities.
Vampire Rain is set in a near future rain-soaked Los Angeles, where following a vampire outbreak the human population is starting to dwindle in favor of the undead, here called Nightwalkers. We follow the capers of a task force of vampire exterminators sent to investigate the disappearance of a previous team sent to assassinate a vampire leader and pick up where they left off if necessary. It doesn't take long for them to discover the previous team is dead and that it falls to them to face impossible odds to complete their mission, taking advantage of the continuous rain, which dampens the vampires' senses. We slip in the shoes of one John Lloyd, lone survivor of a close encounter with vampires which killed his whole squad years before. The team also includes Captain Harrison, the gruff leader, Kelly, the inevitable sniper girl and Hanson, computer and blandness expert.
The first thing you'll notice is how Lloyd dresses pretty much like a poor man's Sam Fisher, with a black sneaking suit complete with night vision goggles. You'll also notice he does his best to move like Solid Snake, in the way he runs, presses against walls, crawls prone and enjoys walking around with a simple pistol during cutscenes despite having an arsenal of weapons in his infinitely deep pockets. When he's not mimicking Snake he likes to climb or go hand over hand along drain pipes like Fisher. The 'inspiration' here is simply transparent.
The similarities don't end with clothing and animations: the on-screen indicators are ripped straight from Metal Gear (the 'life' bar, the flashing 'call' message accompanying a radio call, the radar...), also Lloyd can activate a fairly useless night vision mode and what is de facto the thermal sight from Splinter Cell, except here it's called 'necrovision' and is used to tell the vampires from the living, unfortunately they didn't really do much with this feature, since you'll never have to spot a lone vampire among a crowd of humans, as 99% of the people you'll encounter in the streets of this LA are vampires, which pretty much defeats the purpose of scanning. On the other hand this is useful, since once a vampire is spotted in this mode his cone of vision will appear on your radar, making sneaking easier.
Oh and sneak you must, since the game leaves you zero margin of error, what with an AI which is both stupid and merciless at the same time, simply put if a vampire spots you, you die: yes, a previously skinny girl leaning on a wall or a fat gentleman will instantly transform into an 8 feet tall vampire which will run towards you faster than you can do anything and instantly kill you, forcing a restart. When you step into an enemy's cone of vision the game flashes a pair of eyes on screen for a few seconds, giving you a couple seconds to break the line of sight, otherwise you'll have no chance of escaping: vampires will sprint, pounce and leap 20 feet in the air to chase you on rooftops or knock you off pipes and ledges, leaving you no chance. When you're seen you can put your controller down and wait for them to catch you, suck your blood in an unskippable animation and force you to reload the checkpoint.
You can't hope to shoot them either, since the weapons at your disposal for most of the game, a pistol and an assault rifle, are completely unable to deal enough damage to a charging Nightwalker before he can reach you and kill you in one hit. The only hope you have is finding some (scarce) sniper rifle ammo, conveniently scattered around the city, which allows for an instant kill on an unsuspecting enemy, or a shotgun, which offers enough stopping power to survive a frontal encounter with a bloodsucker. These unbeatable common enemies are balanced by some of the easiest boss fights in gaming history. One must wonder how these wimps became vampire lords in the first place, since they are obviously much weaker than any of their henchmen and can be shot down without effort.
Unfortunately gunplay is less than functional, in fact it's pretty terrible: pistol and assault rifle have an incredibly low fire rate and slow reload, meaning you will be a sitting duck most of the time when facing the common street Nightwalkers. Even the sniper rile is almost useless once you're seen and the shotgun sems to deal random damage, unless you literally stick it in the target's mouth before shooting. The cover system is just for show, you won't be able to lean and shoot, as the game will pop you out of cover if you try to. Your best chance is to avoid enemy encouters completely. It really feels like the developer couldn't find a way to seamlessly favor stealth over shooting, and so in turn decided to make combat almost impossible. Tip: that's not good game design. Also bad game design is the inclusion of unmarked map boundaries, which prevent you from exploring most of the city (there's only a few blocks of it anyway). You'll cross the street to try and evade the gaze of a vampire, only to be stopped by an invisible barrier (and your superior yells at you too "Did you forget your mission?!").
AI is equally laughable: enemies will stand around immobile, blocking access to certain areas (a paper-thin design exploit used by the programmers), or will endlessly walk along fixed paths like automatons. They will not react in the slightest even if you snipe the head off the guy they are talking to and will often repeat the same phrases over and over again: "I love the night, but I hate the rain, but I love the night, but I hate the rain...".
If you're feeling adventurous you can sneak up to them and stab them in the back with what the game calls Ultraviolet knives, which sound stupid, but are quite useful, since they can dispatch a single enemy in one hit, but are limited in number and need to be found lying around. Unfortunately vampires have a truly superhuman hearing, meaning they'll often turn around and savage you even if you're moving in perfect silence. Other times they'll ignore a shotgun blast a dozen meters away. Luckily for him, Lloyd moves faster when prone than when he's sneaking, which is pretty dumb thinking about it, but seems to make him harder to detect.
Technically we're looking at something resembling an early PS2 game, with blocky models, blurry textures and ugly character models, especially the enemies. Animations are especially stilted: once transformed, vampires move like they are slipping on ice and they frantically shake their legs in a comical, almost pathetic way. The only good graphical aspect is the dripping rain on your character's armor, which is a pretty detail, and fairly unique as well. The rest of the presentation is all kinds of ugly, with grey corridors, grey streets, grey parking lots and grey enemies.
Sound is weak, the weapons lack punch, even as far as suppressed guns go and voice acting is cheesy, which goes well with the corny writing, with gems such as "We need that black box. We have to find the command vehicle and recover the black box, before the Nightwalkers find the command vehicle and recover the black box". It's at least worth a few laughs, and it does get a bit better near the end, when some new characters and some decent drama and conflict are introduced. All in all the story is not too bad, but takes way too long to get interesting, with the first two hours drudging along from boring objective to boring objective. A peculiar and particularly annoying aspect is that the pace is continuosly broken by frequent and often pointless cutscenes, mostly radio calls. Sometimes one will end, the game will let you play for five seconds and then start another one, it's irritating at best.
In conclusion, Vampire Rain is a pretty bad game, it botches as both a stealth game and an action game, with simple sketchy stealth mechanics and awful shooting action. Yet it is not so broken that it's unplayable and it even possesses a certain charm and appeal that will push you forward to see how the story will end, and unlike so many mediocre games out there, here we have a decent ending too.
If you're a hardcore stealth fanatic and you must play every single sneaking game out there, you can do much worse than this game, Velvet Assassin for instance.
Vampire Rain is very nearly a complete disaster, but here and there shows a glimpse of what could have been a much better game if more time was spent developing the core mechanics. It's still not as abysmal as some say it is and not a terrible buy for the $5 or less it costs today.