Arcade game turned Playstation 2 light gun game Vampire Night is pretty much House of the Dead with “vampires.” The vampires are simply all kinds of different monsters that leap, fly, run at you, roll at you, toss shit at you—they’re not the zombies of House of the Dead but they’re also not neck sucking bastards. Especially if you consider that you shoot them with bullets anywhere on their bodies to kill them instead of having to stake them in the heart!
Vampire Night is more action and less “horror” than House of the Dead, which had creepy settings and even zombies popping out and scaring you at times, despite the game being on rails. This game is also on rails, leading you along with no ability to direct your character, but there are no jump scares here and the settings—mostly castles—make this more of a period piece; think Van Helsing as a light gun game.
The graphics are beautiful, coming a long way from the pixelated light gun crap released back in the Playstation 1 days. The game is short and so are the six chapters. Of course you may find yourself playing some chapters over and over again to complete them because, as with all these light gun games originally meant to suck quarters out of you, there are plenty of boss fights that pretty much leave you a sitting duck, considering you have no way to duck from projectiles and if you don’t shoot them, you take hits on your life bar. Some segments of the game are pretty much undoable unless you play with another player…or cheat with a Codebreaker.
And speaking of life bars, it’s not just bosses that have them. Numerous enemies that constantly bounce around the screen and race right for you have mini life bars over their heads and take several hits to kill. There are also humans you can save…if your accuracy rules and you can shoot the little parasites off their bodies. Otherwise, the parasites just grow and you have a new enemy to take down. And of course, you can shoot stuff in the environment to reveal power ups that you also must then shoot to acquire…which usually means you’ve totally stopped focusing on killing the enemies!
Hey. It’s fun to shoot shit with a light gun. But I still like things a little more horror in look and feel than Vampire Night. So glad there have been new House of the Dead games made as recently as the Wii and Playstation 3.
