There are dozens of different ways that this game could have handled fighting the ‘nightwalkers’. Hellsing, Buffy, Blade, multiple series have shown us that vampires are tough but not invincible. They have also shown us that even the thoughtless genocide of a blood-sucking race needs some kind of plot and background behind it. Too bad this game wasn’t paying much attention to the experts..
In a special ops team of five, you are the jack-of-all-trades named John Lloyd. Part of a secret section of the American government, you have one assignment in the game: to find the Prime Nightwalker in a city crawling with them, and take him out, making all Nightwalkers of his brood die with him. The opening movie clip to the game shows the commander of your organization looking angry that the pencil-pushers have been slowing him down so much, and one of his underlings mentions that in less than three years time, the nightwalker population will outnumber humans. All that was nice, but the game seemed to fall apart the longer I played it.
The advance team was, predictably, slaughtered down to the last man. Few of them even had signs that they were drained of blood, the liquid splattering the surrounding area and drying..strange. Drawn with blood on shutters you see the archaic symbols of sun and moon, furthering the mystery. Yet did the game dwell much on those nice, potential stories that they’d set up? They just made you chase this way and that, trying to find the various equipment that the advance team left behind, finish their job, and account for their bodies. If there was any storyline behind the game that was at all interesting, I couldn’t see it in all the running around. There didn’t seem to be much point in what I was doing either, making me feel like a headless chicken trying to find a safe place to die!
Now, if there was a reasonable way to kill the vampires in this sunless, rain-filled world, then it might have gotten a five. But it doesn’t, you shoot at them with weapons that take too long to kill them and end up slaughtered yourself multiple times, frustrating you. The only weapon I saw that could kill them with any real efficiency was a sniper-rifle, and you need to blast them straight in the head or every bloodsucker around will suddenly see you and kill you! It’s little wonder that vampires are going to be the dominant species..we can’t kill them effectively!
Who are you going to call when vampires stalk your streets, and fear grips the land? Someone else, because these guys are currently spending all their ammo on one baddie, and dying when the others come for dinner.