When critics and the public universally slam a game, it should die a quiet death. By virtue of its new moniker, you might think that Vampire Rain: Altered Species is a revamped version of the horrible Xbox 360 game with improved mechanics, but this is sadly not the case. Every ounce of what makes the original so terrible is alive and well in this horrible product. A stealth action game involving vampires had potential, but instead, it'll suck the life out of you.
Vampire Rain is a pain in the neck to play. Its developers tried to copy elements from other games, but nothing works nearly as well, most notably the Splinter Cell series. This is primarily because games like this are only fun if you feel like you have the slightest chance of success. Yet Vampire Rain boasts about its rigorous difficulty as if it were a feature to be proud of, not because of ingenious puzzles or strategy, but because it's cheap. The balance is off kilter, with the vampires, or night stalkers as the game calls them, severely overpowering the humans charged with hunting them and preventing an apocalypse. Granted, vampires should be formidable adversaries, but this doesn't mean that they should be able to kill you with only a few blows as you use a armory of potentially cool but underpowered weapons to try to survive.
It's one thing to force the player to sneak rather than kill, but spending your time avoiding the undead creates a major disconnect with the story. Second, the sneaking mechanics don't work. If you are spotted, there is rarely sufficient time for you to seek appropriate cover before being mauled. To make matters worse, there are too many night stalkers in a given location to make this feasible. Developer Artoon relieves some of the difficulty by reducing the number of enemies you'll face, but this is merely an admission of faulty game design.
As for other PS3 tweaks, the useless weapons and their ammunition are more prevalent, and the story was fleshed out further, but these are mere bandages that can't stop the hemorrhaging of such a terribly broken game. Multiplayer helps ease the pain, but this is assuming the core campaign was good enough to inspire you to play it; the same balancing issues between vampires and humans that plague the campaign mode return. Be it co-op or competitive, the multiplayer only serves to showcase to your friends the gross errors in design, thus spreading the scourge to other innocent people.
While the sound design is wholly inadequate for a game that requires an acute sense of your surroundings, the visuals are equally bad. The PS3 version, despite having extra development time, somehow looks worse. A color palette for Vampire Rain is nonexistent, which you will notice as you lurk through dreary alleyways, rooftops and hallways. There are jaggies galore on the character models, which are completely devoid of originality, and character faces are just downright sloppy, with low quality textures and a lack of detailed animation. City patrons aimlessly walk the streets, oblivious to the bloodshed around them, a testament to the game's moronic artificial intelligence.
All of this boils down to a game that is way beyond mediocre. Vampire Rain: Altered Species, however, reeks. Regardless of your tastes, this is not a game to sink your teeth into.
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