Although FDTD is primitive and buggy, I enjoyed its battles in bullet time and seafaring setting...
What’s left are some fairly diverse battles – escort missions, key quests, point defense, and one of my favorites, some shooting-gallery style sniping – waged mainly in the cramped bowels of a huge ocean liner-cum-prison ship. FDTD’s highest difficulty setting adds some very entertaining resource management to the mix; I never seemed to have enough ammo and health packs -- at least for the first half of the game – so every weapon in my arsenal had a turn at dusting off some bad guys. The verb “to dust” carries a heightened meaning in FDTD, as well, since Seth’s re-deadened enemies sift away into nothing through a primitively animated but nonetheless satisfying burst of grey ashes. Another interesting convention that appears in FDTD is the unlimited availability of “bullet time,” which is very handy for securing those precious headshots to replenish Seth’s health with some good old-fashioned, Van Helsing-approved staking. Unlike other titles that use slow motion to give the player a fighting chance against overwhelming odds, FDTD sets no limits to the amount of time spent ticking along at four frames per second, so the player could conceivably spend almost the entire game sleepwalking (although I don’t recommend doing so, because that would be boring).
As for my negative experiences with the FDTD, the dialogue was just awful in parts – as Mr. Wolpaw mentioned, Seth’s exchanges with other characters are often hammy and disjointed, although almost all of them are painless with less than a minute in length. I ran into a few annoying crashes as well as one major game-killing malfunction while I was gallivanting through the topside rec area with Sergeant Rodriguez and friends. Seth’s two-step gait was more annoying than problematic, but I received a few rough bites and scratches from some attackers while trying to align my stance to properly stake one of their buddies.
Overall, I enjoyed From Dusk Till Dawn for its slow-motion ballet of destruction. Although the smooth white walls of the prison ship were somewhat repetitive, every area was decorated with some nicely oogy corpse bits, blood spatters, wreckage, and other signs of an undead mutiny. The fiends in FDTD were varied enough to call for two or three different weapons in each exchange. Even though Clooney’s smooth operator approach to adversity was sadly left behind on the front steps of the “TT” Twister bar, it was still fun to walk in Seth Gecko’s shoes for a few evenings.