Interesting blend of stealth, action and challenging missions. Requires a lot of patience.
Rain effects, clear mini map, grading system add replay value, enjoyable stealth gameplay and great action scenes.
Weaknesses
Poor boss fights, uninspired storyline, bad voice acting, lack of enemy variety.
This review will cover the single player experience as nobody is ever online.
The American Information Bureau has received reports of several civilians who have disappeared as a result of Nightwalker activity. These vampire-like creatures present a threat to humanity, so in an effort to stop them, an elite covert ops team was born. You play as John Lloyd; a man who had his team killed by these bloodthirsty monsters. The storyline takes time to evolve; putting more emphasis on individual tactical tasks, rather then the bigger picture.
Each mission has various different objectives such as: Go to point A, kill the Nightwalkers, retrieve this item, act. Most of the early missions are simple tutorials; it does a great job of explaining the controls, while introducing various abilities.
Slow pacing and difficult missions seem to be the most popular objections to this game. Yes I can understand both these points; however this will potentially isolate impatient players. Its not like avoiding the Nightwalkers is that difficult, in fact once spotted a pier of eyes will appear and get brief amount of time to hide. If they do spot you, they charge and unless you equip your shotgun or sniper rifle, you're unlikely to survive.
It is possible to kill the Nightwalkers by sneaking up on and using a special knife, unlike most games these knife are disposable so it only can be used once! Missions tend to have items lying around and are easy to locate on the mini-map.
The mini-map works very well and makes quite clear roughly which direction to head to reach your objective. In addition it shows the locations of items, scanned Nightwalkers (Along with their line of sight) and other members of your squad. Good placement of objectives is always good, thankfully Vampire Rain doesn't disappoint; with a simple arrow to indicate which direction to go. It's no GPS, but it is suitable for purpose.
As I have been nice to this game so far, lets look it the flaws in the game. Firstly the bosses lack any kind of challenge, it relies on this repetitive old school boss mentality which is easy to outsmart. Plus the voice acting is uninspired.
Vampire Rain does have the best rain effects I have ever seen on the Xbox 360. Everything the rain hits from pavements to people it responds and shows that they spend a lot of time and effect getting this right. The gore scenes also look fantastic, with sign posts going through bodies, body parts, and blood all over the place. Sick stuff really. Glitches can include models suddenly appear during mission briefings, when civilians spot you they just cower and just sit there shivering and some clipping issues when Nightwalkers hit you into boxes.
The Nightwalkers come in a variety of different models, when they relaxed they look like normal humans, but when hunting they look like the most angry Vampires I have ever seen. The satisfaction of killing these beasts is second to none, especially when they are charging and you manage to decapitate one with a shotgun, sometimes after that they will still keep moving and then drop down a few seconds later. One small complaint is that the blood they leave causes damage, delaying the gameplay.
Replay value is quite high as every mission is graded based the time, the amount of continues, damage taken and accuracy. Getting certain grades will also unlock bonus missions.
This isn't going to be any fun for gamers who don't have much patience, but those who do will get a good blend of stealth, action and challenging missions. Consider picking this one up used or at least rent it.