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