Customer Reviews

Dracula Origin

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Dracula Origin is a point and click adventure game (Third person view) made by Frogwares Game Development Studio.

In my opinion I think this is the best adventure game since the classic old Sierra games. The graphics are great and adjustable. The puzzles are hard right from the beginning, but are fun and feel very rewarding when you complete them, but you have any trouble you can just hit the space bar and it will give you hints.

It also has amazing spooky ambient music always playing. Composed beautifully.

The game follows the story written by Bram Stoker "Dracula".

The game runs with no problem on any decent computer. You can adjust the graphics to fit your liking.

So If you enjoy spooky adventure, great storytelling, puzzles and vampires this game is for you.
Great game.

Amazon didn't have the requirements posted so here they are...

System Requirements:
* OS: Windows® XP SP2/Vista(tm)
* CPU: 1.5 GHz Pentium® 4/Athlon(tm) XP 1500+
* RAM: 512 MB
* Video Card: 128 MB DirectX® 9
* Compatible Graphics Card
* Sound Card: DirectX® 9 Compatible Sound Card
* DirectX®: DirectX® 9.0c or Higher (Included)
* CD-ROM: 4x
* Hard Drive Space: 2.5 GB
* Peripherals: Keyboard, Mouse
and Speakers

In yet another PC adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula (Microids: Dracula 1 & 2 DJC, Microids: Dracula III), Frogwares has created some interesting twists on a beloved tale. You take the role of Van Helsing, vampire hunter, on the bloody trail of Count Dracula. The game begins in London, where Van Helsing has just received a letter from Jonathan Harker.

Dracula: Origin is plenty dark and gory; the game is rated T, and there's certainly a lot of blood and gore (including graphic torture, mutilation and satanic rituals). The game's locations (London, Vienna, Cairo, Transylvania) sparkle and really add depth to the story; puzzle-wise, you spend a large amount of time in Cairo exploring the market, museum, and several residences. Sadly, the section in Transylvania felt more like a tacked-on afterthought. The ending is super-brief, but I enjoyed it.

Graphics: the prerendered backgrounds are generally very intricately rendered, with period touches (detailed paintings, tapestries, etc.). The character animations are somewhat less successful; Van Helsing's movements are wooden (this is a third-person perspective, so you're watching Van Helsing move *a lot*). The cutscenes are beautiful, though. Lip synching is somewhat off in cutscenes, but it's generally not a distraction. The load screens are more of a watercolor wash instead of rendered (and load times are short).

Sound: the background music is generally unobtrusive, with a piano-based score that includes fear-drenched organ and quivering strings from time to time. For some reason, the music in Cairo reminded me strongly of Big Fish's soundtrack to their Blood Ties game. Sound effects are very good. It's obvious that English was the second language; there are some subtitles in particularly that don't mesh with the recorded dialogue. Also, Van Helsing got on my nerves; his melodramatic, gasped "Closed!" at finding doors locked was grating.

Gameplay: Dracula: Origin is an inventory-based game. You only pick up what you need, and it's generally pretty obvious what goes where (although some solutions are a bit of a stretch). There are several puzzle varieties including decoding, sliders, logic puzzles, and find-the-items. The game leans towards the easy side, with plenty of hand-holding; on many occasions, I longed for a more difficult solution. It would have been nice if two different difficulty levels had been included (beginner and advanced), but I thoroughly enjoyed the puzzles.

Are there some shortcuts in design and graphics that I found annoying? Yes. But Dracula: Origin looks great, plays well, and is certainly one of the better-looking adventure games to come out recently. Because of its intuitive puzzles, this is a perfect first game for those new to adventure gaming. And fans of vampire lore will find plenty to sink their fangs into as well.

This is adventure bliss.....well done.I am shocked i didnt see this coming, i thought this was going to be like the last few dracula games that were bland and dark and not exciting, boy was i wrong, this has to be one of my favorites..say definetly top 10 maybe even top 7.This game is almost perfect in every aspect.

great story, draws you in the further you go.10 times better than any dracula game in the past..they took something that had a great story and made a great game that nobody else has been able to do for the dracula series.

if you love games like tunguska, crime stories, agatha christie games, jack keane, black mirror, you will enjoy this.The puzzles are great,you combine objects in your inventory, you can press the space bar anytime to see all the hot spots if all else fails...always helps if you dont like to pixel hunt ,there is a lot of pixel hunting but the graphics are so good its fun.I had to look at a walkthrough 3 times..there are a couple tough ones..but once i saw the answer i was sure i would have gotten it had i stuck it through.There will be plenty of easy and medium puzzles to enjoy.The part i really like is when you go in a house say with a few rooms, and you get stuck..they wont let you leave the house, which is good because who wants to go searching a million places to see if they missed something.You know the answer is within your inventory or the few rooms you can search.

I really liked this game,well done to all involved,i couldnt stop playing it.the controls are fine,the voice overs are fine,the speech is fine,the dialoge is short and sweet, no boring conversations that you dont care about...what more can you ask for!

i will preface this review by mentioning that before i played "dracula: origin" i had recently played "syberia" 1 and 2, so those were the games i found myself comparing this to in terms of puzzles, scenery, graphics, and dialogue.

as another reviewer mentioned, loading the game was a frustrating challenge. i have windows 7, and since the specs say the game is compatible with xp, i figured i wouldn't have a problem. unfortunately, the anti-piracy software built into the game wouldn't allow me to start playing once i'd installed the FOUR discs this game came with. i had to spend half an hour looking up a solution to this initial issue.

as far as gameplay goes, i found myself more annoyed than interested in saving mina from the vampires. i like to be able to randomly wander around huge areas, collect information, talk to people, and solve complex problems. and i'll admit, i secretly enjoy puzzles that are so complex that i have NO idea what to do. "dracula" was not one of those games. the scenes were limited to only a few frames to wander through and there were minimal characters to interact with. the few characters present were either long-winded slow talkers or had nothing to say. the puzzles themselves were okay but not great. most were pretty simple to figure out with logic skills, but i will admit that there were a couple that made me sit back and think for a few minutes.

the constant change of scenery was nice, but i still felt shortchanged by this game. the graphics were a big area i felt letdown by. "syberia" was released in 2002 and had some amazing scenes. "dracula: origin" was released in 2008 and looked like someone had put fangs on characters from "the sims."

i would only recommend this game to someone who likes a low to medium level of challenge in an adventure game... if you like challenging games (like "myst" or "syberia") this might not be the one for you.

Based on prior reviews, I expected this game to be more interesting and a lot better than the other 3 Dracula games that I've played. Unfortunately, I found this game to be rather lame and not nearly as good as the others.

To begin with I found the story to be a bit muddled. On one hand it seems to be a retelling of the Dracula story in that it involves Harker, Mina, Van Helsing and others. On the other hand it seems to be occurring after the original story because a lot of characters already know about Dracula, except for Mina (?). On top of that, there are references to the Lovecraft mythos (which has nothing to do with Dracula) and a very fanboyish text in an "old" document that starts off "I waste him with my crossbow". Okaaay... that's a mood breaker.

On the plus side the graphics are very nice, the music is OK, and the 3D models are not too bad. The voice acting is fair, though Van Helsing should have a Dutch accent. My favorite character is Mustapha, who has many amusing things to say.

On the minus side are the seriously annoying pixel hunting, the puzzles, and the poor English.

I generally try to play adventure games without resorting to hints, but early on in this game I completely missed an item I needed because it was only a couple of pixels wide and blended into the background. Fortunately in this game you can use the space bar to highlight the hotspots on the screen, so I ended up using this feature a lot.

Many of the puzzles seem to exist merely to have puzzles in the game since they don't make any sense in context. Several of them are used as "locks" to doors, etc. ( I'm sure someone's going to go through 20 minutes of a sliding puzzle to get in their house.) A lot of the puzzles have no instructions or hints from any other part of the game so half the "fun" is figuring out what to do. This usually involves clicking all over the screen to see what can be manipulated. (You can't use the space bar to find hot spots on close up puzzle screens, so you must resort to pixel hunting.) I ended up using a walkthrough because I found so many of these obtuse puzzles to be frustrating. Also, the walkthrough was necessary for one puzzle that involved reading a word problem written in stone. The contrast was so bad I was unable to read it on the screen.

Regarding the English, there were misspellings, bad grammar, subtitles that didn't exactly match what was being said, and misused words that sometimes made it difficult to understand what was meant (or just made it laughable).

If you're looking for a good adventure game, I recommend Dark Fall: The Journal, Dark Fall: Lights Out, and The Lost Crown.

I purchased the video game Dracula: Origin awhile ago. I meant to write up a review of it too once I finished it, but I hadn't had a chance to finish it until today. I love vampires and video games so this should have been a great game for me - but was it?

I started playing the game shortly after I bought it. However, due to its anti-copying security code on it (or something) it prevented me to load it in my DVD drive. I could only use it in a plain CD-Rom drive. Sometime after my "Save" and the next time I tried playing it, it wouldn't load. So, I put the game away and planned on playing it later once I figured this out. Well, to fix it I had to uninstall it (which thankfully didn't delete my saved game) and play it from there. To risk having to do this again, I decided I'd play it in one run.

I'm pretty good at problem solving and games where you have to think some with. However, without the walkthrough guide for this game, I don't think I would have been able to finish it - let alone have finished it today.

Playing the game and moving around is really easy. You can push the spacebar and everything you can interact with is highlighted. However, the mouse moved slow and my game was sometimes laggy - but that might be due to my PC.

The graphics were pretty good. Many of the landscapes and the characters looked like something from The Sims though - or maybe I just associated it like that because I'm an avid Sims player. The cutscenes weren't very long though.

I liked that you got to move around London, Cairo, Vienna and Transylvania though. A change of scenery is always fun in games.

The story that the game is based around was good. However, the pace of the game (even with the guide) was quite slow. It is supposed to be an "Adventure" game and it just was too slow moving for me. There was no real fighting either, which I think they could have added in some parts at least.

Dracula: Origin also lacks what I bought it for: vampires. Sure, Dracula is in it and another female vampire - but that is it! No other vampires and none that are coming after you to suck your blood. Dracula is pretty much a pansy too - he even doesn't come after you himself. He is too busy trying to have Mina (the girl you are trying to save) become his lover-reincarnated.

I rate it 2 drops of blood out of 5.

We just finished playing this game and overall, we enjoyed it quite a bit.

First, we should warn that there were some technical issues with the game. At one point in the middle of the game it started refusing to save, and we needed to update all of our drivers and run the game from the disc once in order to get it to save again. So, we would highly recommend installing all patches and updating all drivers before beginning to play.

Once we had gotten past the technical issues, however, the game was quite enjoyable.

The design of the game was beautiful. There were several interesting locations which were all designed with a great deal of detail. The plot was cohesive and coherent and we found the ending satisfying, unlike many games we've recently played.

The atmosphere of the game was dark and a bit creepy and squeamish people should note that there are several images of dead bodies and blood. However, those who are looking for a proper horror game should look elsewhere. The atmosphere was gothic, but the game was never really scary (unlike games like Barrow Hill, Dark Fall etc.). Also, you can't die in the game, which we like, but some people might see as a disadvantage.

In terms of game play, the controls were comfortable and convinient, with none of the newfangled attempts at "innovation" that usually fail appallingly. It was 3rd person, no 360 panning and all that. In terms of design and controls it was quite similar to the Sherlock Holmes games.

The game was somewhat linear, in the sense that you couldn't really move forward until you had done everything you needed to do. However, it was much much less linear than some games we have played recently (again, the Sherlock Holmes games come to mind). It's not one of those annoying games where you can't pick something up until you know why you need it.

We found the game challenging and the puzzles sufficiently interesting and diverse. It was nice that some puzzles required inventory items while other were pure logic.
For the most part the puzzles were logical and we didn't find ourselves using hints or walkthroughs very often (and when we did, mostly just because we were impatient). There were a few situations where items required a bit of pixel hunting, but this was not too horrible, because of the space-bar feature that allows you to see active areas.

Per our taste, we would have liked the game to be a little bit longer, but it still took us a few weekends to get through it, so it was good value for money.

Overall when comparing it to games we've played recently, we think it's better than the Sherlock Holmes games (which we overall enjoyed but found too linear) but is not as good as The Longest Journey or Syberia.

Before Dracula Origin, the last adventure games I had played were in the "King's Quest" series back in the 80s and 90s. I adored them, but after Sierra stopped making them and I couldn't find anything else similar, I gradually lost interest in computer games.

I stumbled upon this game by accident while searching for something online, and became intrigued by the screenshots and positive reviews. When I started playing the game, I was not disappointed. The graphics are beautiful, and the soundtrack helps set an eerie mood. I liked that the puzzles seemed to become progressively challenging as the game went on, and the difficulty level of the puzzles was usually just right for me--challenging enough to make me work for it, but not so hard that I couldn't finish them if I kept at it (except for two, when I had to give up and find a walkthrough).

A tiny caveat: while I loved most of the puzzles, the solutions to a couple of the obstacles in the game were a little random--try every object in your inventory, or combining any two objects in your inventory, to see what works--rather than based on logic. Van Helsing is also unintentionally quirky sometimes and made me laugh. When you try to talk to the local townspeople in Cairo, he seems surprised that they speak to him in Arabic, and fumes, "Useless. I do not understand their language." I wasn't sure which language he was expecting the locals to speak.

Overall, I thought this was a great game. Visually, it's gorgeous. It also doesn't hurt that there's a renewed interest in vampires in general these days. Now that I know that there are adventure games like this out there, I'm looking forward to trying more.

Edit: after playing another adventure game, I've decided to go back and update Dracula: Origin from 4 stars to 5 stars. I keep hoping I'll find another game as good as this one.

I just recently bought this game. I played all the way through it and must say it was awesome. It had everything in it. Horror, Adventure, Suspense, Mystery. I gave this game 5 stars because It had good graphics, had no bugs, Played nice, had short load times, an was just plain awesome. If your a fan of adventure games like I am I highly recommend this one. I guarantee you won't be disappointed :}

Game looks interesting but they have made it too hard to figure. We are stuck in the beginning of game and there is no way out. Game shouldn't be that hard that one need to spend nights and find out.