Or at least that' s the impression I got from playing the Vampire Rain demo. As far as I know, it' s only up Asia (Singapore more specifically) and I' m not quite sure what I think of it.
My first reaction to the game was, " Oh my god, your main character is Sam Fisher! it' s Splinter Cell!"
No he' s not really Sam Fisher, but his costume is almost IDENTICAL to Sam' s in the original Splinter Cell, complete with holstered supressed pistol & whining nightvision goggles.
Then I backed against a wall and peeked around the wall & went, " Oh my god, the animation, it' s MGS!" They look like they were taken right from MGS2. As in they went in to the Konami offices & nabbed the mo-cap data & had a field-day.
Then I drew my weapon and started walking around with it, and was like " Oh my god, it' s GRAW!" . Imagine the fluid movement of graw' s LT stance, only you can' t switch sides with your rifle. That' s what it' s like when you draw a gun in the game.
Then I started mantling objects, & shimmying along ledges & dropping down from a hanging position & went, " Oh my god! It' s MGS
and Splinter Cell!"
So you are John Everyman, member of STAR, I mean Supah Killing Zombies Squad, or whatever, & it' s your job to infiltrate the zombie' s hideout and grab weapons. Yes, to grab weapons, that' s the only objective I was given. So I end up sneaking around this urban area very similar to what it' d be like if you could walk the streets in Silent Hill, Annnnd then I got to the combat.
Eeesh. It smells pretty foul. You start off with a supressed pistol and an M16 clone, also fitted with a supressor. My first impression was that I wasn' t holding down the trigger hard enough, because the M16 was only firing about 4 rounds-per-second. And then I realised, yeah, it really only does fire 4 rounds per second! And that' s the more useful of the two! The pistol apparently is a muzzle-loader, because it takes about a second after each shot to fire again.
And all this wouldn' t be so bad if it weren' t for the enemies. They look like your average Xbox character models until you alert one of them to your presence, and then they go all zombie-ripped and are darn near indestructible with your current weapons. Unlike most zombies, these guys become faster, haze your vision something fierce, become more aware and much stronger when zombified, making it useless to even try shooting one without having a shotgun in reserve, which seems to be a one-shot kill if aimed near the head. I find it funny that it takes 15 rounds (no seriously) from an M16, or one slug from a Mossburg clone to bring it down. I didn' t kill anything but a rat with my pistol.
The combat is something similar to that one gamecube game, yeah, the one that didn' t sell any copies, the one with guns in it? That' s the one. Which is a bit of a pity because your character model is quite nice, and environmentally speaking it' s a rather eerie place to be, it' s just that the poor combat and, well, lacking level design bring the overall quality waaay down. I couldn' t give it more than a 7 out of 10, and that' s only because it had some good elements from some of the best games on the market.
BTW, big thanks to Quez. I wouldn' t have found this piece of (honestly pretty funny) code if you hadn' t asked me about the S-pore account.
Still no Blue Dragon though.