Countdown vampires is not exactly a bad game, although I do not by any means want to play it again. It does a few things right, and what it does wrong is nothing that Resident Evil hasn't done wrong while still selling millions of copies worldwide. But therein lies the main problem with Countdown Vampires - it is, in just about every way you can think of, a poor man's Resident Evil, to the point that it even shares Resident Evil's lingering fundamental design flaws. Thus, it irritates me in the same way that Resident Evil does, while at the same time failing to make up for that in the way Resident Evil does, at least during its better moments.
This is not to say that Countdown doesn't pique my interest in a few areas. For one, I wonder why it takes place in "Casino City." It's very obviously supposed to be Las Vegas...so why not call it Las Vegas? Does the chamber of commerce or the city tourism bureau levy some sort of fee for use of the term in a fictitious setting? Or did the game's developers fear libel complaints, in case someone took offense at the intimation that the city was infested with vampires? Whatever the reason, it's Casino City, and you're Keith J. Snyder, detective on the clock and bodyguard after hours, protecting assorted VIPs at the opening of a horror-themed casino. Like clockwork, something goes horribly wrong - go-go dancers start turning into vampires, innocent gamblers go down in a froth of carotid spray, and you're suddently on your own to survive the horror however you can.
Gameplay
This you do with only your trusty anaesthetic gun, a handful of snack foods, something called "White Water," and no shirt, since Keith decided to attend a fancy dress occasion in just a trench coat, pants, a swank set of blackwork tattoos, and a nifty pair of shin guards. Ours is not to question why. That anaesthetic gun is part of one of the game's more interesting concepts, though. See, these are all innocent people who've been turned into vampires, and so morality dictates that you shouldn't kill them stone dead unless absolutely necessary. You can neutralize them nonviolently with the anaesthetic gun, taking them down with several shots and then dousing them with the White Water, which turns them back into humans.
A bit of a flaw appears in this system as soon as you discover another weapon, though. Given the choice between taking down a vampire with about five darts, waiting for them to get up, pumping another three or four into them, and then going over to douse them, or alternatively blowing them away with one 12-gauge slug, after which they conveniently fade into nothingness, which would you pick? Nonviolence is all well and good, but efficiency is even more prized when you just want to make it to the next locked door and get on with things.
That's how Countdown Vampires progresses, more or less. Kill vampires. Find key. Go to locked door. Open locked door. Repeat. It's mainly a matter of picking through every corner and making sure you don't miss any vital items. If you do miss one, there'll be hell to pay, as you thrash around violently trying to figure out what you missed - you'll wind up exploring every nook and cranny of the explored sections of the map, trying to find the little box that escaped your eye or the safe that you forgot to open up. The puzzles you encounter are generally very basic, requiring only the application of an item or the completion of a simple brain-teaser (although I quite liked the System Shock-style safe lock puzzles). When you do encounter more difficult puzzles, some of them can be engaging, but others are unneccessarily frustrating - it's not much fun to encounter a puzzle that's made difficult not by the sheer complexity of it, but by the fact that the instructions are too indistinctly translated from the Japanese.
Combat, on the other hand, is not that difficult at all, once you remember how to compensate for the inherent clumsiness of Resident Evil's control style. Yep, you still turn on a dime - nobody's introduced Keith to the concept of sidestepping. He does, however, automatically aim at the nearest enemy when you switch to the R1 firing stance, which is a nice touch - it makes dealing with hordes of onrushing vampires quick and simple, especially when you're packing that way-cool shotgun. Item management, the other common problem in survival horror games, is actually not so much of a problem in Countdown Vampires, thanks to a decently-sized inventory and some nice storage innovations. I mentioned snack foods in the beginning there as one of your only assets - they're what you use to refill your life, sports drinks and granola bars and so forth (hey, it's just a game). The nice thing about the drinks is that you can store up to three in a bottle item, freeing up inventory space and creating one powerful healing item instead of a bunch of dinky ones.
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