In Paris there’s love in the air but something is wrong. Young artist Leila Saraostre has arrived in Paris to study Fine Art at the world renowned Ecole du Louvre. As she wanders the capital she meets the mysterious Uriel Ruthven who she soon falls in love with. But Uriel holds a dark secret and will destroy him and put Leila’s life in danger. Help Leila travel around Paris and uncoverIn Paris there’s love in the air but something is wrong. Young artist Leila Saraostre has arrived in Paris to study Fine Art at the world renowned Ecole du Louvre. As she wanders the capital she meets the mysterious Uriel Ruthven who she soon falls in love with. But Uriel holds a dark secret and will destroy him and put Leila’s life in danger. Help Leila travel around Paris and uncover clues as to who...or what...Uriel actually is...
Developers Mzone Studio and Solilab it must be said aren’t exactly known for making quality HOGs. No really, take a look at games like Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell (2009) if you don’t believe me. Apart from budget their games (especially their earlier work) show a lack of ambition and a lack of polish. What’s really quite sad about A Vampire’s Romance: Paris Stories (2010) is that playing this bad, buggy mess of a game for more than five minutes you begin to notice the potential for such a better HOG. Let’s put aside for a second the nonsense plot with its badly structured chapters, bad pacing and ridiculous take of having vampires survive in daylight. I’ll even forgive the poorly developed plot about a secret organisation after mystery man himself Uriel because it has potential as does the romance of the game. What we have here is a HOG with scale; a romantic thriller that takes place around various famous landmarks of Paris than can only be reached via subway. It’s an open world HOG with potential to be exciting and unique.
It’s just the problems outweigh anything good the game is trying to do. Puzzles like finding out a keypad combination make zero sense and rely on trial and error while the art puzzle offers a complete lack of guidance on how you’re supposed to be doing it. Should I be drawing by moving the mouse or just (as I found out after a while) clicking and hoping the game puzzle doesn’t reset? The hotspots are the worst I’ve seen with a total lack of accuracy when you try to click on objects and that’s if you can find them. The graphics are so zoomed in you’ll need to go see an ophthalmologist afterwards due to extreme squinting. I’ve never experienced such bad item design and placement before. It probably doesn’t help there’s a nasty reoccurring bug in the game that freezes parts of the screen in full screen mode meaning if you need to click on an object in one of those areas you need to play this squint filled game in windowed mode, which unless you have a massive display makes it even more impossible to play. The idea of travelling by subway is a cool but the execution is simply terrible. I mean I’m bad enough reading maps as it is but the game offers little guidance as to how you can plan a journey other than looking at the colours of a train line and going “yep, I think I could try that way”. Travelling via subway feels random. It’s annoying because there was the opportunity to really do something unique with the map system had it been implemented properly. The game’s length isn’t an issue this time and while an extended edition tries to add more to A Vampire’s Romance it doesn’t rectify any of the games current problems or anti-climatic ending that when it comes to family is just morally wrong.
Here we have a game that offers potential to be good but is ruined by the typical flaws games from these companies had at the time. It suffers from huge bugs and even on the extended version the gameplay ends up more frustrating than something approaching playable. I was about to end this review with a poor pun about this game making a ‘sucker’ out of anyone foolish enough to buy it but for vampire fans this game manages to make them disheartened for wanting something better that any put down would be adding insult to injury. Very disappointing.… Expand
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