After doing the JA preview of Frogwares latest title – Dracula Origin – I was greatly looking forward to playing the full game to see if the interest it had sparked in me after being off to an impressive start could maintain that same level of satisfaction and interest.   After having now completed the game, I walked away with some mixed feelings.  I’ve sat on this review for a week because I wanted to be sure I felt the same way about the game now as I did after I first finished played it. I have to ask myself if I’m being overly negative or letting the frustrations of a few bad points get the best of me because they were fresh in my mind. A week later and I still pretty much feel the same way about it, so – here you go.

I had issues installing this game on Win XP (SP2) as autorun seemed to hang and do…, well, nothing. It required going into Explorer and running setup.exe, which wasn’t a very good first impression.  Once all that was resolved the game seemed to be pretty stable and follows the 3rd person point and click format while giving you a 1st person view when solving some puzzles.

Dracula Origin has you playing the part of Professor van Helsing on a quest to track down the infamous vampire and save Jonathan Harker’s main squeeze – Mina.  Anyone familiar with the Bram Stoker novel knows the story.  However, in this game you do not play as Harker – the main protagonist of the book.

Other than the cast of characters, this game doesn’t seem to stick with the book very much.  That’s not a bad thing and there is an opportunity to see another side of the story, but at the same time you have to ask why do they even bother using the same characters if they are going to tell their own vampire story?  I can only suspect that the name Dracula will sell much better than Randy the Vampire.

Expect to travel from London to Egypt, to Vienna, and then to Transylvania for the final confrontation.  At these locations you will explore cemeteries, a run down manor, ancient Egyptian ruins, a library, a monk’s abbey, an old inn, and Dracula’s castle.  No sanitarium?   Nope. Like I said, other than the cast of characters, this game goes into its own direction with the story.

Graphically the game is stunning in most places – mainly just the 1st 3 quarters. Some screens though seemed a bit quickly thrown together. Nitpicking I know, but when you see things like a beautifully modeled room with a photo of a chandelier Photoshopped in, it sort of stands out. Not that this happens frequently. The vast majority of screens are beautiful, but when you see something like that you suddenly get the feeling of, “Hurry, we have to get this thing together and released before Kheops releases Dracula 3!”

Puzzle-wise there is a mixture of inventory based and logic based puzzles.  Most were pretty straightforward and logical, while others seemed out of place and placed in the game just for the sake of having another puzzle.  Other than that, there were some really great and innovative challenges for the player and those are truly the highlight of the game.

There were a few problems with the pacing.  In all honesty I started to forget what the game was about.   I didn’t feel like there was much of a story developing other than, “stop Dracula, save Mina”.   There were no ‘aha’ moments or increased interest as the background was fleshed out – no pun intended – because there wasn’t really any story developing.  What was there was a thin story linked together with a bunch of puzzles and pretty graphics.

The first problem with this game is that you know what to do, but can’t until van Helsing has some epiphany.   The first being the dates on a crypt that you can easily read after uncovering them, yet you must continue to click away on your cleaning job until van Helsing says, “Aha!”  In another area you can easily make out some numbers because they dominate your screen in HUGE text, but you can’t use that information to solve a puzzle because van Helsing says he doesn’t have enough information.  The solution was to click on the number(s) so he says, “Aha!” Very frustrating.

One puzzle involved piano keys and notes.  The problem is there was no reference anywhere as to what notes correspond to what keys on a piano.  The only way to solve it was if you the player are actually a musician – which I’m not.  I ended up solving it by going out of the game and doing a Google search for piano keys/notes.  VERY frustrating indeed.  I would like to assume that there was a reference to those keys and I missed it, but after going through that area again several times I found nothing.

Last up in the frustration department are the hotspots.  These were probably the single most frustrating parts of the game.   Not that they were small – although some of them are, but easily discernable – it is that some of them are so close together that they touch leaving one to believe it is just a single hotspot.  Case in point - some rats standing on a satchel bag.  Since hovering over the rats and bag shows the cursor change to a hand with no apparent ‘break’ in between, the assumption is that it is a single hotspot and not two individual ones.  All I can say for those of you wanting to play this game, you might have to click several times around what appears to be a single hotspot - based on your cursor - before you actually hit the one that is needed. 

While pressing the spacebar reveals all hotspots on a screen and is a welcome feature, somehow HAVING to use this feature seems like a cheap way out.  I played the entire game without using this, as I tend to play games right out of the box without reading the manual in order to see how intuitive they are and determine how well the in game help is put together. I do look at the in game controls setup on games and there was no mention of the spacebar.  It was after finishing the game and reading the manual for the review that the spacebar feature was revealed.  In all honesty, I think this takes the game in an entirely different direction that makes the game exceedingly easy and a walk in the park …other than some of those rather difficult logic puzzles. While helpful, it just seems like cheating to me.  It also gives developers an excuse for making hotspots exceedingly small or being pretty devious in their placement – like in dark corners.  If anyone calls it unfair, they can simply say, “Well, just press the spacebar.” That just seems like a cop out to me. I understand that some people need the extra help and have no problem with this, but you should still be careful with the placement of hotspots for those of us who prefer to go at it with no help.

With those gameplay negatives aside, most of the puzzles seemed very fair and pretty straightforward.  They were also very original, as I had encountered several that I had never seen before.   It’s unfortunate that these things can take away from your overall gaming experience. Had the story been a bit richer with a dramatic ending, then these might have been minor inconveniences.  As it stands the ending was a bit of a let down.

You finally make your way to Dracula’s Castle and the load screen displays an image of it.  It looks huge and it gets your blood pumping for some serious exploring.   Unfortunately, there are only 6 rooms you get to explore before the game is over.   The most surprising thing of all was just how easy it was to end the game.  There wasn’t any build up to it.  Finally there was Dracula.  Do something… (No, I won’t give a spoiler!)   Game over.  There was no prolonged tension, no anxiety trying to save Mina.  Other than early in the game, there weren’t any situations where Dracula slipped through your fingers that might have held things tighter together and added to the drama.  You finally see him in front of you, click, it’s over.  Not just that, but after watching the cut-scene, there is another cut-scene after that that has you saying, “Huh?”

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows® XP SP2/Vista™
• CPU: 1.5 GHz Pentium® 4/Athlon™ XP 1500+
• RAM: 512 MB
• Video Card: 128 MB DirectX® 9
• Compatible Graphics Card
• Sound Card: DirectX® 9 Compatible Sound Card
• DirectX®: DirectX® 9.0c or Higher (Included)
• CD-ROM: 4x
• Hard Drive Space: 2.5 GB
• Peripherals: Keyboard, Mouse and Speakers