If you've ever played 1st person adventure games, you've probably come across games, that portray the gameworld in pre-rendered 360-degree images you can pan around relatively freely. In those freely rotatable pictures, hotspots are hidden for you to hunt. If the game is poorly designed, those hotspots have very, very small detection areas, so that you will most likely miss them and are forced to run back and forth between scenes multiple times before checking out from a walkthrough that the item you needed for a pretty simple puzzle was right next to you the whole time. You just didn't either pan the screen enough or just missed it every time. If you are lucky, the game is one of those sensibly designed ones, with good navigation and solid, easy to find hotspot areas. Guess what kind of a game Dracula: Resurrection is?
The opening movie paints the picture of why Dracula (Gadler) has gotten a bit mad at Jonathan Harker (Gasman): 7 years ago, Jonathan and Quincy Morris killed Dracula, thwarting his plans on getting it on with Mina Harker. Quincy dies, but the lovebirds flee back to England to live happily ever after. But, alas, happiness is not in the cards, as Dracula is still kicking around and now Mina, being antsy because of her bite marks, runs away to the old fangboys castle. And Jonathan runs after her, like a proper hero he is.
Back in Translyvania, Jonathan soon finds out that some of the locals have made a pact with the dark lord. This means the local meanies are an obstacle to his progression towards the castle. The first half of the game takes place in an area around a local tavern, from where Jonathan has to find his way to the castle, preferably alive. There are friendly people at the tavern, the old bar patron and the landlady, who are more than willing to gab about the evildoers and the area a bit, giving some clues on what you should do. All the other people you see are obstacles in the service of the impaler (which he longs to be in all of the graphic meanings of the word).
As the bridge to the castle collapses when Jonathan tries to cross it, the only way in is through an old mineshaft. Having kleptoed everything he could from the village, Jonathan finally gets to the castle, where the first "person" he meets is an ancient vampire Dorko, who has been imprisoned in the castle dungeon for centuries. She is suspiciously keen to aid Jonathan, but not willing to look the gift horse in the mouth, he does what is asked of him, mainly spending some time in finding an ancient amulet the vampiress is after.
Being good on her word, Dorko shows Jonathan where Mina is held captive, but as you'd guess, the old lady was too good to be true. She was after power all along. Gasp! Shock! Horror! The cad!
But all is not lost. It turns out that Dracula has tinkered with Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine in his tower. Quickly, Jonathan opens the large hatch, carries his wife onboard and escapes while drop-dead sexy vampire brides try to stop him. And so ends the first game from a 5-part Dracula series, the last of which was released in 2013, around 14-years after the release of the first part.
I won't go too deeply into the gameplay, as the game plays pretty much as you'd expect from a game like this: you run through static rooms, which you can pan and rotate as much as you want, looking for hotspots. You collect items that you then use on solving puzzles, all of which are relatively easy, but at times annoyingly difficult to find thanks to some elusive hotspots and items that blend on the background graphics a bit TOO well.
Other than that, the game is a pre-rendered FMV extravaganza. It is evident, that a lot of time, money and effort was placed in creating the surroundings as well as the characters. The people you meet in Transylvania are intentionally very grotesque and unappealing in appearance and surprisingly well animated. While some of the animations are at times a bit jarring and textures leave room for improvement, it all was state of the art from the perspective of the latter part of the 1990s.
If not counting the time you spend on hunting those damned hotspots, most of the game is actually spent on watching FMV sequences of people talking about things or cutscenes of story progression. There are a lot of facial closeups and apparently, a sort of facial motion capture was used as well. And that actually does show, as the people you can talk to are pretty expressive.
Speaking of speaking, the voice acting is surprisingly good. Though looking at the voice credits, it shouldn't be that big of a surprise, as while there are no big names in the cast, it mostly consists of seasoned voice actors, who had been doing a lot of acting even before Dracula. It wasn't that uncommon for the era to have relatively fresh actors doing the voices.
Another note of interest is, that the developers actually called Dracula: The Resurrection as an interactive sequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula rather than an adaptation of the book. That does make sense, as the story here begins from somewhere where the original book ended. It does try, at times on its own clumsy way, to expand the novel. That said, I don't think Stoker would have included an actual flying machine designed by da Vinci in his own book. But then again, I've not read the classic (shame on me, I know), so what do I know. He might have gone full Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter in the book for what I know.
So, I guess it's fair to say Dracula: The Resurrection is a story-heavy game with a tonne of FMV stuck into it. While it does, at times, have a very nice atmosphere, I wouldn't call it a great game. How much you'll like it boils down to what's your tolerance level on easy to miss hotspots. It's not a hard game nor a lengthy game at that. If you don't succumb to using walkthroughs, I'd say you can play it through in 3 to 4 hours, with a walkthrough in hand, it's less than 2 hours.
You've been warned. Still, all the games are still commercially available either through GOG or Steam. On that note, the pictures on this review are from Steam, as I just couldn't get good screenshots from the GOG version in any method I tried. Oh well.
Comments
Post a Comment