Is
there a Golden Raspberries Awards for videogames? If not, there ought
to be. I’m sure we’ve all played a game that is so achingly awful
that we wish we could warn others about it. Today, dear readers, we
have a contender for grand prize.

First let me tell you that
this game is available for download for $17 US. $17! I repeat-$17!!
Please download the demo fist if you are seriously thinking about
this game. The full game is only about 600MB, so it’s a relatively
small download.

Don’t be fooled by the
hottie in the picture above. This isn’t you! Nor is this anyone important
in the game. This is the wet dream of the developers – an enticement
designed to get red-blooded 20-30 year old males playing the game.
I repeat: do not be fooled.

Vampire
Hunters is marketed at the Vampire Bloodlines set. This is in itself
not a bad thing at all. However, when there is a game that has set
a certain standard, it is embarrassing when another game is knowingly
marketed as revolutionary yet can’t meet standards of even mediocre
games. How not one beta tester or friend of the developers shared
realistic feedback is a mystery worthy of scientific study.

Playing this game, I soon
composed a list of its failings:

• It looks about six
  years old. The special effects are crude and uninspired. Clipping
  is hilarious in Seven but didn’t happen as much under XP. I became
  stuck every time I played the game under Seven.
  I got stuck in walls, a bar, a fence, you name it. And don’t start
  me on the places I walked in the air, the spots where I could seemingly
  walk outside of the intended physical boundaries!!! The game is
  presented in a third-person “Tomb Raider” perspective
• Soon after I noticed
  the dated graphics, I tried moving the character with the uninspiring
  hero’s name of Bernard! At this point, I discovered the abysmal
  mouse control as I spun around in circles. The readme mentions that
  this CAN be an issue in Windows Seven but their advice is to change
  mouse sensitivity in the control panel. Yes, in the control panel.
  In other words, in order to play their sub-par game, I am advised
  to turn down mouse sensitivity so I can’t do anything properly with
  my computer. The readme also says this doesn’t happen in Windows
  XP. So, I installed it and ran it under XP: exactly the same result.
  I contacted the support team. They went through the rigmarole of
  getting my PC’s specs of course. Their conclusion: my PC (bought
  just 2 months before and capable of playing Doom 3 on near-full
  settings) was NOT POWERFUL ENOUGH because it had onboard video.
  When I pointed out that the game wasn’t running slowly, their reply
  was that because of their revolutionary “mouse speed fluency
  auto-adjustment”, the game was spinning my mouse out of control
  because my system was too slow! I suggested a manual adjustment
  like almost all other games involving action elements contain: no
  reply. It just doesn’t make any sense that a modern PC playing such
  an obviously simple graphic game should have problems because of
  an onboard card. What happened to scalability?!?
• Dialog is insipid, clunky,
  and even patronizing. I realize that the game is translated from
  Croatian but here is a game that errs on the side of not enough
  explanation in setting the game story up. I literally had no idea
  what was going on at the beginning of the game and new quests are
  acquired without any rhyme or reason. Later, when dialog is provided,
  it usually ends in inanity that feels forced but is supposed to
  be humorous. The quests are completely confusing – there is
  no reason why anything happens. The game area is limited by artificial
  boundaries such as a boom gate that the character could easily squeeze
  past. Every quest seems only to be there to lead to the next area.
  The developers claim the ten different locations form an “
  integral complex” whatever this means. There are inexplicable
  teleport spots in the game – don’t ask me what the point of
  these are…
• 
  There are adventure elements in the game. This usually involves
  finding dark nooks and crannies and picking up money or codeine
  or attack magic. I couldn’t fathom why so many discarded items are
  just lying around. Who leaves money in a dark corner in the dockyard?
  Why are there drugs and magic books in the water?
• There is a degree of
  role-playing in the game also. You are given experience points that
  you can use to spend and “develop” your character. These
  seem to have no effect on the game at all. Often, I would find myself
  “rewarded” with a new skill or attack but universally,
  these novel abilities were weaker than the ones I already had. A
  role-playing game needs to be progressive and a good one incorporates
  choices made by the player cleverly to affect outcomes and interactions
  in the game.
• Sound is sparse except
  for the overwhelming “horror themes” that drown out
  most other sounds when something “exciting” is going
  to happen. I say “exciting” because the game is so overwhelmingly
  dull that if not for the music, I wouldn’t know that something was
  happening in the game. The code came to me as a “beta 1.5”
  with a request to forgive the incomplete sounds. It was apparently
  on the way. There is no dialog (at least not that I could hear)
  so I’m not sure what the final product will be like.
• The game involves a
  degree of combat. Never fear, adventure fans! The combat is loosely
  modeled on the turn-based approach found in games like Fighting
  Fantasy…very loosely. The developers claim there is a cerebral
  element to the battles but the controls are so uninspired and slow
  that you can make a cup of coffee in the time between choosing an
  action and watching the generic animation onscreen enacting your
  desired direction. Just remember also that the combatants you meet
  are only part of your battle – expect to fight against one
  of the most horrible cameras in any game in existence. Often you
  cannot even see your enemies because the camera is behind you or
  behind a wall!
• I mentioned before
  the absence of mouse sensitivity control. The controls are typical
  action controls, easily configured to the standard WASD from the
  arrow key defaults. There is unfortunately no strafing (an addition
  that would greatly modernize and improve the success of the game).
  Controls modifications are limited but strangely, deselecting “always
  run” makes no difference to the character running in-game.
  Be careful also of clicking “start” in the start menu.
  If you’re not careful and click twice, you’ll end up shutting down
  the game because of the unfortunate position of the “end game”
  button in the next menu.

By
the way, here’s the email for the developers’ support: support at
vampirehunter dot eu. Expect to use it often if you choose to play
this game.

But what about the pros
in the game? Well, it’s about vampires. That’s about it. I got it
for free so I only lost the cost if the download. So, that’s another
positive, I guess.

The developers claim that
“the city lies down to sleep while somewhere in the middle of
an old dockyard a man’s life fades away. The most skilled vampire
hunter is dead. The night is damp and chilly as the investigation
begins. The main character in this tale is an adventurer who has been
living in the company of the undead for years. The story starts to
unfold as a mysterious murder, apparently without a motive, takes
place on one of the dockyard’s piers. None of the Nosferatu
clans claims responsibility for the attack and what are (sic) even
worse, strange things start to happen.”

This
is as poetic as the game becomes. Save your money and sanity –
this is a frustrating game. It is certainly one of the worst games
I have ever played. It needs massive rewriting and needs to actually
beta-tested by real-life beta-testers. Perhaps they use vampires,
because I can’t imagine anyone with a pulse suggesting this game be
released. There are far better games out there to play. I can’t recommend
this one at all. The game deserves a D.

System Requirements:

• PC with 1.3 GHz processor
• Graphics card for modern games with 256 MB ram (preferably 512
  MB ram)
• 1.7 GB of free hard drive space during installation
• Microsoft Windows operating system (preferably Windows 7, Windows
  Vista, Windows XP)

Tested System:

• PC with 2.70 GHz dual-core processor
• Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 (onboard) with latest graphics
  drivers
• 160 GB of free hard drive space
• 2 GB RAM
• Microsoft Windows Seven & XP