Reviews

What an uncool game behind such a cool name ... !!!

2 / 5 .

You'd have to be batty to like this game.

1988 Gremlin Graphics Software (UK)
by Holger Ahrens and Udo Graf

What was wrong with the Gremlin Graphics folks? Was this game worth £8.99 (£12.99 for disk version)?
Not only the game is incredible outdated in almost every aspect, but also badly programmed.
The only thing I like in it is when our character comes falling down the stairs. Someone should have done the same to the original cassette from a 10 storey building flight of stairs.

At first glance it may seem unfair to give such a high score. In fact, I was about to give him 5 points but I thought it was unfairly and artificially inflating his score.

Vampire's Empire surely pointed much higher, but it was a failure. Why? just look at its original artwork, mapping... and compare with frustrating playability and several specific but cumulative problems.

Else, a rough look at its gameplay and mechanics reveals more, much more. Not enough care was taken to polish the final product. Something akin a prototipe or demo.
Some frames of the graphics at the spritesheets are horribly deformed, while most of them are more than good.
Gameplay suffers the most from a few design decisions.
On the other hand, map is professional, huge like a few maps, typical of the great titles.
Very original game solutions like separating the definite weapon of Van Helsing, the light ray and its behaviour like an AI controlled independent character.

Overall, a clearly lost opportunity, but a raw gem worth of study to get inspiration.

Vampire's Empire (1988)
This could be an excellent videogame, if not for a series of serious flaws.
It has a huge map, full of funny details. Some foes are integrated in the background itself!
At the beginning, you get caught out of guard and the monsters suck fast your energy.
Good to have a great deal of instruments to accomplish your mission. Indeed, You are the Master Van Helsing!
In the technical aspect, the action is quick and flow thanks to use XOR graphical impression. But here and there, a bit quantity of graphics are chaotic in itself, you don't have to see the character mixed with a background to not being able to realize if that is the graphic in itself or there is a bug, or something.
Maybe it's worth to see "Historical development graphics" in WOS to check that, aside of excellent individual sprites, there are some ruined ones. Maybe it was because this is the least important version of Vampire's Empire, being behind the C64, Amiga etc. In fact, it could be that, being german programmers, they opted for those different plattforms as the priority effort, given that sales of ZX in Germany were low; or maybe they ran out of time!
In any case they fell short of doing an excellent job, but not for much.
Overall, 3.5/5