Dark Angel: Vampire Apocalypse

Pros • Lots of lighting effects • Shooting ranged weapons is cool • Great music	Cons • “Fog of war” everywhere • Uninspired level design • Pointless gameplay
Bottom Line Dracula himself would fall on a wooden stake if he knew that the race he sired had anything to do with this game. Dark Angel: Vampire Apocalypse takes somewhere between 300 and 400 hours to complete. You read that right. Unfortunately you’ve seen all this game has to offer in the first 5 minutes, so the remaining 299 hours and 55 minutes are relatively pointless. No backstory and an even less enlightening manual add to the “why am I doing this” sense of ambivalence that will pervade your Vampire-slaying experience. Overly simplistic corridor-style level design with a few tile set changes makes for some pretty uninteresting dungeon crawling. On the plus side, the music is actually really good and some of the lighting effects are nice, like the lightning attacks from the off-screen creatures that attack you. Quests are usually of the “kill everything” or “get this item” variety, and again there’s no compelling reason to complete any of them other than to gain experience. After a year is up, the Shadow Lord will supposedly appear, and you’d better be prepared. Metro3D need not have wasted their time with an ending to this game because no one will ever have the stomach to wade through the 300+ hours of pointless gameplay required to complete it.

If Blizzard can go after New Line Cinema and prevent them from using the word “Diablo” in a movie title, how come there’s a game called “Dark Angel” with a female lead character that has nothing to do with the TV show? That’s show business.

Dark Angel: Vampire Apocalypse by Metro3D puts you in the role of Anna, a Vampire slayer charged with the protection of the three towns of Hom, Westhaven, and Rygard. You’ll battle monsters and embark on quests given to you by the goodly townsfolk, hopefully gaining enough experience points along the way to eventually fight the Shadow Lord. Unfortunately the Shadow Lord won’t be appearing any time soon. One hour of game time is equivalent to 1 day of slaying, so expect to be playing for well over 300 hours. If you want to get it over with quickly (and you will), die fast and die often because each death rewards you with 3 days off your yearlong quest.

The first clue that this game was rushed is that there’s no intro movie or background story of any kind. You start the game in the middle of a battle, then talk to a few townspeople (on-screen text only), and then guess what? You’ve just seen all this game has to offer. I hope you liked it ‘cause that’s all you’ll be seeing for the next 300 hours. Each dungeon is laid out with a series of connecting corridors and big empty rooms with giant destructible candlesticks, that, when destroyed, explode into fragments and disappear. Naturally, dungeons are very dark, but fortunately you give off a glowing white light; unfortunately, it doesn’t even fill the screen. This means you actually have to walk into every corner of the room to make sure you haven’t missed anything. Believe me, you never do.

Scattered around the levels are various boxes and crypts full of goodies and weapons that fit nicely into your rather large inventory. Dark Angel does use a very clever method of equipping Anna with various items, where each button on the right side of your controller can be mapped to a different item from the inventory. For example, you can equip her with a sword, a mace, a pistol, and a potion and each of the four buttons will activate the desired item with a single press. The melee and ranged weapons can be carried one in each hand, which makes for some pretty decent combo-attacks. The manual states that different weapons work better on some creatures than others, but there’s no description of the enemy types so it’s all guesswork on the player’s part.

The music really shines in this game and does a lot to create a gothic atmosphere. There’s a kind of techno-eerie feel to it that blends well with the action and slower parts of the game. Sound in general is very well done, especially the firing of your flintlock pistol. It’s got a bang-on hollow ring to it, and Anna’s stance and the resulting billow of smoke show that real care went into at least one aspect of the game.

If this is some kind of punishment for all those people who complained Onimusha was too short, then Metro3D have produced what might be considered the ultimate gaming hell. If anything, Dark Angel: Vampire Apocalypse is a counterpoint to anyone who argues that Diablo is a simple button mashing hack-and-slash, because Dark Angel is just that and is as far removed from Diablo as you could possibly get.

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