Zombies have always been regarded as low-grade creatures in the hierarchy of undead beings. Frequenting tawdry out of town shopping malls, clad in rags and groaning incoherently, zombies are an unfussy lot, showing no refinement of pallet whatsoever when it comes to selecting whose flesh they want to chomp on. Vampires on the other hand have always been a tad more sophisticated. Somewhat particular about whom they target for their daily haemoglobin cocktail (usually an attractive member of the opposite sex), a vampire is well tooled with the necessary skills for securing a satisfactory victim. A vampire is a master of seduction, dresses well, has a knack for silver tongued Wildean witticisms and usually lives in an opulent hilltop castle, festooned with all the finest haberdashery of the period. [And then there's Spike! Buffy Lovin' Ed.] Unfortunately, Vampire Rain shows no such class and in fact has much more in common with the shuffling ineptitude typified by your everyday run of the mill zombie.

The game takes place in a rainy unnamed city that for some reason is always dark (the reason why is never explained). You play John Lloyd, a fearless husky-voiced identikit hero complete with a mysterious past, five o'clock shadow and Sam Fisher complex. Joining a crack special ops team, it's your mission to rid the streets of the growing nightwalker epidemic.

The first thing you will notice about this game is its cut scenes. The animation is rigid, the dialogue dreary and the syncing executed with all of the flair of a Fifties Kung Fu movie, unintentionally drawing the occasional snigger. The voice acting itself is hammier than a spam factory and from the moment the game's elongated intro begins, it is clear how little care and polish has gone into this title. Worse still is the fact that when you actually get to play the game, what little flow it has is constantly interrupted by these ineffectual cut scenes, which do nothing to help maintain any sense of atmosphere as they spell out the hokum plot.

Playing the game itself is equally painful. Combining a mix of stealth and third person shooting could have been so much more fun, but Vampire Rain is hideously unbalanced. In order to encourage a stealthy approach, the weapons (for much of the game) are mostly useless against the nightwalkers, which can wipe the floor with you in only two hits. Some of your weapons are not capable of dispatching even one nightwalker when the situation calls for it, such as the standard issue silenced pistol (it must have come with the Sam Fisher costume that Lloyd wears). In fact, when not picking vampires off from a distance with a sniper rifle, the shooting action is a near non-entity, turning the game into a series of bland stealth-based waypoint excursions punctuated by frustrating deaths and annoyingly frequent cut scenes.

The enemy AI is appalling; when not attacking you, the so-called nightwalkers behave like your typical GTA pedestrians, chatting to one another, smoking and wandering around aimlessly. If you snipe one nightwalker that is chatting to another, the remaining one will happily continue to converse with the thin air left in place of its dispatched buddy. There are other strange inconsistencies of design; for example, the apparently bloodthirsty vampires can still easily hold down a job as a night watchman (even when there is nobody left in the town to watch). The stealth action itself is monotonous, as there is usually only one route to take to the next waypoint, which means there is a lot of waiting for drones to walk their pre-determined paths until there is an obvious opportunity to move to the next shadow or safe corner.

Movement and object detection are also riddled with grating flaws. Traversing the game world becomes laborious as, due to poorly executed control detection and object recognition, you always have to wait for Lloyd to finish going through the animation for one move before beginning the next. This means that going from shimmying along a ledge to hoisting yourself up can result in an unnecessary wait - and often an untimely death at the hands of a Nightwalker.

Visually the game is a mixed bag. Lloyd floats rather than walks - apparently he's not connected to the ground - and has a tiresomely slow run speed. Enemy animation is jerky, with the transition from running to jumping looking particularly poor. The environments themselves are admittedly rich in places, but assets are recycled so often that it's easy to lose your bearings, with each street indistinguishable from the next. Perhaps the only area in which Vampire Rain excels is in the rain effects, which soak every corner of the game, forming puddles, bouncing off rooftops and running convincingly on your rubber suit.

The sound effects are not up to much unfortunately and, considering how heavily a good stealth game should rely on well placed audio cues, Vampire Rain's sound effect design is not so much bad as it is completely ignorant of what it should be shooting for. Coupled with some cheesy, repetitive music (a situation-sensitive effort that stops and starts abruptly whenever there is a change of pace in the action) and the aforementioned awful voice acting and dialogue that isn't even up to the same standard as your average episode of Teletubbies, it's fair to say that Vampire Rain's audio design is in keeping with the rest of the game's dearth of quality.

There is an online mode, but it has been cut from the same cloth as the main game, with slipshod design and a feeling of being hastily cobbled together from whatever assets the developers had lying around. As such it amounts to little more than five maps where you can merrily capture the flag, frag the opposition or defend a base. There is one slightly more interesting mode called Death or Nightwalkers, a point scoring game where game leaders are given Nightwalker status and can perform all manner of fancy attacks and jumps, but because there is no fluidity of movement, traversing the online maps against intelligent human opponents is even more frustrating than in the single player mode. Expect the lobbys for this one to be as quiet as a graveyard in the dead of night.

Vampire Rain reeks of a lack of effort; it is hard to imagine that any developer would defend a title so flawed, boring and ultimately devoid of fun. There is the occasional feeling that the game will somehow establish a cult following; it is unintentionally funny and poorly made in all of the ways of a true B-movie, but it would be a very forgiving geek who would allow this game to be favoured in such a light. Vampire Rain may have been an average title ten years ago, but by today's standards it isn't even worth a rent, so avoid it like a hungry undead creature bent on eating your soul.

Reviewed by Fraser MacInnes for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).