Vampires Until Dawn
	Genre: Adventure Developer: BeCrush
Publisher Region Released BeCrush NA 08/28/2010

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User Review

Review by zippdementia
February 22, 2012

There's funny bad and there's painful bad. And then there's Vampires Until Dawn, which makes me feel like I got ripped off and it didn't even cost me a full dollar. Vampires Until Dawn is to good what a stake in the heart is to continued living.

To its credit, the game opens with a sense of brooding intensity. The black and white artwork is stylishly offset by an occasional splash of red. The opening unvoiced narrative hints at the occult without ever mentioning the words. Vampires lurk in the shadows of the plot: the chair with its striking colour of blood, the gash mark in the neck of a dead wife that inspires the hero to track a similar set of murders to Mexico, and even that hero's name, Mr. Garlik. I'll admit, "Mr. Garlik" almost kills it for me, but campiness is staved off artfully by the musical mood; an echoing patter of piano music made up of that kind of barely-on-time not-quite-a-melody that can send your mind spinning instantly to thoughts of despair and rainfall.

For an entire minute and a half, Vampires Until Dawn is a decent game.

After that, the graphics turn into poorly animated polygons, the music becomes monotonous, and you're tossed into the middle of a night-time arena to fend for your life against the damned of Mexico. If I were generous enough to assign this game a genre, I would call it a top-down shooter, similar to Gauntlet in its concept, but horrible in its execution. Gauntlet gets old after a while, but at least the levels are interesting and each one is unique. Here, you don't wander any dungeons or cool environments. Each level could fit on a single ipad screen and the setting goes beyond uninspired to feeling uncompleted (the first level is a dirt road with a fence). Enemies spawn in waves and you have to take them out with Mr. Garlik's magical endless-ammo handgun. After each wave, you get some health and a new weapon. It's basically an endurance run to see if you can make it through all the waves of a level. What happens after that I can't tell you from personal experience but online videos strongly suggest that it's more of the same in other stiflingly original levels (a dirt road without a fence).

Vampires Until Dawn is an experience where I'm actually happy to see the game-over screen because it means I'm done playing. I cannot beat the first level. Not because it's a hard game to beat but because it's a hard game to play. The controls in Vampire: Until Dawn are atrocious. It's the kind of control scheme you absolutely do not ever want to see anyone produce on an iphone. Rather than create actual touch controls the designers went ahead and pasted two giant joysticks on the bottom corners of the iphone's screen. I use the word corners here in the same way I would tell you to just keep an elephant in the corner of your studio apartment. So what if it's big? It's in the corner. Just put it out of your mind.

Touch shooters using the “twin stick” interface are not new, but I'm not partial to seeing it done. The left stick controls movement and the right aims and shoots your weapon. I get the concept, but it's mindless. The iphone offers a touch screen, GPS systems, and gyro-controls that know how far it's titled at any angle. With so many options available to developers, why create a system that's like playing a normal game except with the controller held right against your face? It's ridiculous. Resorting to pasting a controller on the screen is the worst kind of laziness. I'm going to call it uncreative ingenuity. It's so uncreative it's actually ingenious. Also, joysticks don't control themselves. Something else has to be on the screen for them to work. Yeah, that's right. THUMBS. Two giant thumbs blocking half the screen all of the time.

I don't want people to think I despise this game just because of the dual sticks. Some people like the twin stick system and some games have done it well, such as Modern Combat. That was good because the control sticks were tucked away in the corner of the screen and were hardly distracting from the action, which was programmed to take place in areas where the sticks wouldn't get in the way. Unlike in Vampire, it worked because it was subtle and the developers took it into account when designing the rest of the game. You cannot appreciate the system as it is slapped upon us here, where you have to jerk your thumb halfway across the screen to get the the game to recognize you are trying to move left.

In other news, I found a bunch of glitches within the first seven minutes. The first one you can recreate at home. Run to the top left corner of the screen. There's some whitish-grey blob here that I think is supposed to be an overturned semi. Push up against that and don't let go of your “joystick.” After a few seconds, you'll start to magically rise into the air. Flying doesn't help you, sadly. Enemies can still hit you, but you just shoot over their heads now. Keep doing it, though, and you'll leap right over the edge of the map into an area of infinite blackness. Enemies will follow you for a short time here but they can't stand the darkness for long. They will eventually sink down into the inky ooze and you'll be left alone, to wander forever lost in what is suddenly a much better game than it once was. The other glitches are random and they aren't as fun. They mostly involve the game not recognizing when you are trying to move the joysticks (AKA play the game).

To top it off, the action lags... badly. We're talking about a game that looks like it could have come out of the N64 or, if I'm being very generous, the first Playstation. Certainly nothing newer than that and yet if you get more than seven enemies on the screen it slows down. This isn't an iphone problem. I've been playing Final Fantasy Tactics on my iphone with no hint of lag and that's a game with a lot of graphical stuff going on. There's no excuse here.

And damn that music to hell.

Say the following with me, leaving a slight pause between each word: DUN DUN DUNT. Now pause. Do it again: DUN DUN DUNT. Pause. Again: DUN DUN DUNT. Pause. Congratulations. You've just completed singing the musically rich melody of Vampires Until Dawn. It's as mindless as the design, the enemies, and everything else about the game.

DUN DUN DUNT
Whoop, here comes some zombies. I think. I mean, they look like blobs of pixels, but they must be zombies because they are grey and hiss and moan in little goblin voices.

DUN DUN DUNT
Oooh, here comes the dudes with the fedoras, the gangsters. The Italian gangsters in, uh, Mexico. Oh, no, they are shooting at me. Better use the long range weapon except I can't select it because the game won't detect my giant thumb.

DUN DUN DUNT
Oh MY god it's bats, the most creative enemies on the planet. They are killing me with squeaks.

DUN DUN DUNT
And here comes- actually I've never seen what comes after the bats because I lose all hope and let myself be killed.

Like I said, I can't be bothered to beat the first level. I enjoy a good challenge. I even have some tolerance for a challenge caused by questionable design choices. But I have no patience for a game without soul or style. Vampires Until Dawn is completely soulless. I don't care to make it until dusk, let alone dawn. This isn't funny bad. It's just painful bad. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go erase it off my iphone.

Rating: 1/10

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