About a year ago, the developers at Artoon released Vampire Rain for the 360 resulting in bad reviews from the public and the media.  They went back to the game and repackaged it and re-titled it Vampire Rain Altered Species and released it for the PS3.  Unfortunately they didn’t really fix anything and the game is still not an enjoyable title.  Top to bottom this rerelease is flawed. 

You play the character of John Lloyd, a member of the Nightwalker Elimination Squad who looks like a blatant cross between Solid Snake and Sam Fisher.  Do all stealth fighters look the same?  They could have, at least, given him blonde hair or something else to separate his brooding exterior from other, far more developed, characters in the same genre.  Lloyd is sent on most missions alone and away from his other three team mates and forced to take direction on his earpiece from the stereotypical squad leader Harrison and the overly-chipper communications officer Hanson.  Hanson is best described by his first line in the prologue, “This is my first mission with the Nightwalkers, but it’s not going to be my last,” said in an upbeat bravado that grates.  All the characters are terribly voice acted, but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself...   

Your enemies are Night Walkers, who are kind of a cross between zombies and vampires.  They disguise themselves as normal humans to walk around and can change into their vampiric form whenever they want.  The form they take is heavy on the cheese, involving hunched walking and lightning fast reflexes that are unavoidable.  If you are caught by one of these beasties, you are toast.  You can try to run, scale buildings, or dive down dark alleys to hide, but they will always find you and with one strike you are incapacitated and with another strike you are dead!  Your weapons aren’t that useful, so if you get caught, just wait to restart the level.

The story isn’t that engaging.  There is a super organization much like the FBI who is trying to cut-off the Night Walker threat before it quickly escalates out of control.  As Lloyd, you are sent in to eliminate the threat and help free a town.  There are lots of warnings about how dangerous it is to be out on the streets at night; however, there are a few civilians who wander around while you are sneaking about.  If it’s so dangerous, wouldn’t everybody flee?  The voice acting in the myriad of cut scenes is awful!  There are times where you think that the actors might be reading the script for the first time, or that they really didn’t have a good grasp on the mood of the game...besides all this, the voices don’t even remotely match up with the mouth movements during the cut scenes.  Not even close. 

The gameplay is pretty basic stealth faire; avoid getting seen by your enemies while following a path to the goal that involves scaling pipes, ladders and cutting through dark alley ways.  You get a limited arsenal of weapons that don’t pose much of a threat to the Night Walkers because the only gun that is really useful is the sniper rifle (one shoots the Night Walkers with a head shot), but that isn’t a very good run-and-gun weapon.  The pistol and various other sub-machines take too long to kill the Night Walkers, so, unless you give yourself a very wide berth, you shouldn’t even attempt to kill the enemies, just hide behind their peripheral vision and get to the goal.   

Level design is extremely straight forward.  You follow the pre-laid path without variations and without being able to cut down different alleys or take other pathways to the goal.  The city is rife with potential for fun, but the level design restricts you so much that there isn’t really a chance to enjoy.  You play the same street in a few different “levels” and learn to just follow the path of ammo you won’t even use towards the goal.

You can utilize various vision enhancements courtesy of the Sam Fisher style eye piece to aide you through the well lit alleys and buildings.  The night vision setting is supposed to help you see in the darker levels, but even in the sewer (where you are first told to use the night vision); the graphics and lighting are just fine.  The night vision only makes things unbearably bright and green, no real bonus.  The other setting on the eyepiece is a Necrovision feature that distinguishes between the living (shown as green) and the undead immortals (shown as red).  Without the Necrovision locking on the enemy, you can’t see their vision cones on the mini-map and therefore are really blind and most likely going to die.   

As far as graphics go for the PS3, Vampire Rain doesn’t keep up.  They did upgrade from the earlier 360 version and the rain effects are nice looking, but the physics and actions of Lloyd are very stiff and robotic.  The town itself isn’t that diverse in locale, and the enemies are shrouded in a pixelated fog when they change (I think it was intentional).  Besides the terrible voice acting, the overall sound design was a little flawed.  In the survival-horror genre, music (or silence) can absolutely make a game all the more frightening.  The canned sound effects and so-so music scheme in-game are basics.  And, when you accomplish something large, like pass a stage of levels, there is a “cheesy” accomplishment music that plays; it’s very reminiscent of music that plays after winning fights in a Final Fantasy game (where this music belongs).   

Perhaps the most frustrating part about this game was the loading screens.  After loading 4 gigs of material onto my PS3 hard drive at the initial startup, I would expect that all maps and locations would be pre-rendered during gameplay and there would be little or no load times.  No, there are loading screens for loading screens.  At the beginning of each level there is a basic “loading screen,” then the game tells you to press START, and then another “loading screen” comes on before you even get in a level.  There are also a lot of cut scenes to slow the action down.  Sometimes, there is a cut scene, then a loading screen, then you move a little ways, then another cut scene...all of which makes the action very choppy and very frustrating.   

Vampire Rain: Altered Species fails...at most everything.  This game was frustrating at many levels, from the horrible sound design, to the lackluster gameplay and graphics.  You can’t really enjoy the characters any because the voice acting is so awful, and the concept isn’t fleshed out enough to be remotely engaging.  I would recommend not playing this, just pass on it.

Gameplay: 2.5
This game lacks from all aspects combining into a terrible experience.  The gameplay is straight forward enough because there is only one path to take during each level.  The controls are fairly basic for a stealth game, leaving little else to be desired.  The only thing I wondered was, why did they include a button to unholster your gun if you can’t defeat the enemies with bullets... 

Graphics: 3.5
The graphics are nothing special, definitely an upgrade from the 360 version; however, still just sub-par to average on the PS3.  The rain effects were good, but at some points it looked like the characters weren’t even walking, but gliding above the ground.  The stiff movements of Lloyd were also sub-par, needed better motion capture work. 

Sound: 1.5
Everything sound-wise in this game was wrong.  The voice acting was atrocious, and they’re forced delivery of the story sounded worse than my Mac telling me there’s an error on the computer.  The musical score was OK at best, but when you accomplish something big at the end of levels, the music changes to something that I akin to a bad knock off of Final Fantasy Victory music, ruining the ultimate mood the game should be setting. 

Difficulty: Medium 

Concept: 3.0
When I think about stealth games, I’m looking for something that separates one from the other, and vampires seem like a perfect tool...but this game doesn’t even flesh out that concept at all.  Enemies are impossible to destroy, levels are far too linear, the main character design appears to be an obvious rip-off of Solid Snake and Sam Fisher, and the story wasn’t enjoyable at all. 

Multiplayer: 3.0
There is online multiplayer available; however, after playing through the single player mode, I can think of other games I would want to play with my friends.  The multiplayer includes the basic scenarios: capture the flame, which is capture the flag, and deathmatch mode.  The bonus to the deathmatch mode is that you can become a Nightwalker and own your friends because of your increased speed and agility over the humans... 

Overall: 2.5
This game isn’t even fun enough to be a waste of time.  The gameplay was thoroughly unenjoyable for the genre and style.  A stealth-survival-horror game sounds like a lot of fun but Vampire Rain: Altered Species doesn’t deliver on any level.  There are too many flaws in design and execution that prevent the player from ever enjoying this title.  Pass on this one.