PC Game Review: A Vampyre Story

Ever since the release of Twilight in the theaters, I have seen more and more vampire based video games hitting the PC. It's good marketing if you ask me. Developers see that something is hot, and create games based on the 'in' thing.

Myself; I have always been fond of vampires. Anything that involves vampires, and I'm in. From movies, to video games, I'm all for it.

When I came across A Vampyre Story at my local Best Buy I was intrigued. It was a game that used cartoon like graphics in a superb way. Seeing that I am relatively sick and tired of video games that try too hard to make things look realistic (and fail miserably) I figured I would try something cute out for a change.

I bought the game for $29.99, which I thought was a little steep for a PC game, but hey, it's a hell of a lot better than spending $60 on a new PS3 video game wouldn't you say?

Anyhow, A Vampyre Story starts off with a cute Gothic fairytale like atmosphere that is pretty beautiful on the eyes. A vampire by the name of Mona has been trapped in a castle by her husband Shrowdy. While Shrowdy is out looking to feed, he is killed in the same manner any vampire would be killed. A big old wooden stake through the heart.

As soon as Mona hears the news, she knows that she is now free to escape from the castle and make her way to Paris where she hopes to become a singer. With the help of her wise cracking bat Froderick, Mona is looking for a way to escape the castle.

Things though are not as easy as one would anticipate. There are locked doors, riddles, and other puzzles that need to be solved before Mona can just bust out of the castle.

(The whole time though I was left thinking, why can't I just turn her into a bat, and fly her off of the island that the castle is on!?)
 
At first I was really enjoying the game. The controls were simple and do not require any keyboard commands (although it is an option). I was able to just use the buttons on my mouse for every action.
I was enjoying collecting objects Mona ran into, and speaking to rats, statues and fountain gargoyles.

the one thing though that got relatively boring though was the long dialog. Whenever Mona needs help most likely that help comes from a rat, or a statue, and the conversations seem to go on forever.

Eventually I found myself trying to hurry up and click through all of the boring unnecessary dialog, and lame jokes that many of the characters have. You can click on the space bar on your keyboard to skip past the dialog.

The bad dialog though was not the thing that bothered me most. It was the way certain things were placed into the game to confuse you on purpose. For instance, downstairs in the basement a crew of rats live in the walls. They claim they will help Mona so long as she goes upstairs into the kitchen and kill the cat that keeps killing off their crew.

I spent a good hour roaming back and forth trying to figure out where the kitchen was. A trap door? No. Upstairs? No... to the left? No. To the right? Nope.

The rats never needed me to kill off a cat after all. I had to actually cheat and look ahead in my 'help' section in the included manual to figure out that giving the rats a bag of cookies I found upstairs would make them help me.

The whole 'killing a cat' thing was just placed in there to confuse me, and to be quite frank I didn't like how the game worked that way. I like a good puzzle, but if you assign me a task, and that task does not exist, it gets pretty damn frustrating.

The next thing that annoyed me royally was the way the inventory worked. Mona can carry items that are not heavy, but if she comes across a sword, or a larger object she will store the object in her memory bank, but will not take it along with her.

When she needs the object she will transport back to the area where she saw the object, and then and only then will she actually use the object when she is transported back to the area where she needs to use it. It's annoying because the cut scene is just a waste of time.

All in all A Vampyre Story displays some gorgeous 3D graphics, with easy point and click controls. The characters are all done up perfectly, and the voice's assigned to each of the characters fits perfectly with the animations when they are talking, so I did like the game in this aspect. The worlds are rich in graphics, beautiful to the eye, and the characters are all pretty likable.

The game however is slow moving, and if you get stuck and don't figure out what to do next, the game can grow boring really fast, especially when you are roaming the same rooms over and over again with not even a comprehension on what the hell you are looking for.

Basically A Vampyre Story is a quest to get out of a castle on a remote island. The adventure is slow, but fun at times, especially if you can figure out a puzzle to advance ahead. Clues are everywhere so be sure to combine them if possible.

Although the game has it's annoying attributes, and even gets a little boring and cheesy at times, the graphics and game play are stunning enough as to where you would want to continue on.
I'd give this one 3 stars out of 5. Good, but not great.