Customer Reviews

A Vampyre Story

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For an old time fan of Monkey Island, Vampyre Story scratches a very old itch just in the right place. While filled with warts (and vampires, and bats, and dungeons...) the game's quality shines through minor imperfections and makes it a must have for fans of quirky humor and "adventure games."

I will start with a few negative points about the game to clear them out of the way. I found a number of the puzzles to be of the "try things randomly" persuasion which strikes me as a waste of my time. If I can't deduce what to do, then how is it really a puzzle?

Secondly, I found the choices of voice-actors and the quality of their work to be slightly distracting. While on the whole I enjoyed what they did, there were a number of voices and lines that just didn't fit for me. Obviously that is a personal observation and you might think the whole game was wonderfully cast and performed.

Finally, the game spends too much time, especially in the beginning, laughing at itself. The story hook was weakened because of this and made it harder for me to want to finish the game.

On the brighter side is everything else, and that consists of an awful lot of things. The painted backdrops, goofy art direction, and general feel of the artwork was spot on. Obviously not everyone will love the artistic themes, but they are coherent, pretty, and heighten the gameplay.

Most of the sound work is quite good, especially so for the budget of the game. Many of the jokes are as funny as the characters seem to think they are, and the solutions to many puzzles are just wacky enough to be funny without being stupid.

The interface is definitely best in breed, with a simple and intuitive point and click apparatus, as well as the ability to skip the annoying "walk around the universe" animations as you move from scene to scene.

I would consider this game a good addition to the Adventure Game genre and well worth picking up. Do not expect this to be as perfect an experience as Monkey Island (the first one, thank you) or transcendentally superb like The Longest Journey, but do expect to feel satisfied, entertained, and eager for more from the writers and goofballs that brought us A Vampyre Story.

All i can say is ( its about time ) ..finally..we have an adventure game that hits on every cylinder.Amazing cartoon graphics and cut scenes...a story that has you hooked line and sinker.Great puzzles...that bring me back to the thoughts of monkey island...hours and hours of fun..


this is an instant classic, i cant wait for part 2....this is a must buy for any adventurer...the dialoge is great, hilarious at times,just looking at the most simplest things can be very entertaining..a little chatty..but it adds to the amazing story...

there is one draw back that got me a little tired ..but ...did very little to damper the experience....when you go room to room..the screen goes black...for like a few seconds....

but the good news is...when you walk to a certain place on the screen...you can press the space bar to jump there right away...you can right click on an exit to jump to the next screen without having to walk across...the puzzles are perfectly done...easy to medium to hard...but nothing that didnt make sense...if you are thorough enough you will find the answer...no need to read through tons of papers and books to find an answer... you can also press the tab button to see all the hot spots on the screen..you have your bat friend that also helps you with puzzles,which is an additive for finding solutions to puzzles....he can fly...and so can you...

there are a ton of great moments in the game....just go buy it...you will be so glad you did...the only bad thing is...you will be spoiled...

I REALLY like classic point-and-click adventure games, and I think that this game is one of the best to come out in recent years. The artwork is superb, the puzzles are logical, and there actually IS a plot. From the ending, this is obviously a two-part game - which may account for some complaints that the game is too short; however, Part 1 had enough gameplay for me. I'll buy Part 2 because I enjoy these types of games and because I want to see first-hand how it all turns out. But in any event: Let The Buyer Beware. If you like Action/Tactical RPG games or most of the games that are sold today AND you have never played a classic point-and-click adventure game, you probably - I say PROBABLY - won't like this game. But for those of us who love (and still play) games like Obsidian, Grim Fandango, Blade Runner, and the Myst/Riven/Uru series of games, this one is one more to add to the stack of adventure games that are FUN. (Okay - some of the jokes ARE lame and Mona's voice IS like fingernails on a blackboard, but this is a great game nonetheless.)

Overall the game is really good on all levels but was extremely disapointed about how short the game was! It was too quick both me and my kids were diapointed. If I would have know I would have bought it second hand!

Though the game was very attractively drawn and rendered, I was disappointed in Vampyre Story, primarily due to the dialogue and limited number of scenes. Clearly the design team was on the top of their game with the rich colors and nicely done artwork. But I found the game frustrating, and often, annoying for the following reasons:
- Irritating dialogue: the scripting was meant to be comedic and goofy, but ended up just being plain tedious to get through, with old & tired jokes and humor that mostly just fell flat. This is by far the talkiest game I've ever seen...you have to sit and listen through the characters chattering up to 5 minutes at a time. You can hit the spacebar to skip lines, but if you skip you'll miss important clues that the characters give in their loooooonnnnng inane chats. It gets really old.
- For some reason the developers thought it was a good idea to mark all the active areas of every screen. If you hit tab, it'll show little bat figures at every clickable object. Sure it eliminates pixel-hunting when you're trying to figure out which item you need, but this seriously reduces the challenge of the game. They're almost giving it away.
- Some of the tasks you have to figure out don't make much sense at all. Combining a straw with a bat to clean up crumbs in a control panel? Going through an oddball process of getting water under a door to free yourself from an office, when there's room to just fly through the window? But I guess the illogical puzzles make up for the easiness of finding the objects to use in them.
- At the same time that they mark all the clickable objects, there's no similar shortcut to see where the exits are in a room. You have to randomly swish the cursor around the screen until you see a red arrow before you can move to another room.
- Very few scenes/rooms in the castle. All of the action in the first 2/3 of the game is in about a half dozen locations. Must be a pretty small castle. More variety & more scenes would help cut the tedium.
- Some of the objects you have to collect in inventory never get used for anything. But you can't move on until you collect them.
- The storyline & ending. Or lack of ending, as it were. Made me feel like I just spent days playing this darn thing with nothing to show for it at the finale. Frustrating.

So I wouldn't really recommend buying this game. It's nice to look at and some adolescents might get a kick out of the crude humor (lots of double entendres & toilet jokes). Would be worth checking out as a hand-me-down if you get it from someone else, but really not worth the price.

This game is fun, creative, and witty. I absolutely loved every minute of it. The game is in the style of Monkey Island, so fans of those games have something new to try out. The comedic humor in this game should appeal to anyone. The only con to this game is that its very short, it took me only six hours to finish only to find out later that there is a Chapter two planned.

Bought this game so my dad would stop bugging me to buy this. What caught my eye was that the artist of Curse of Monkey Island worked on this so I purchased it. Great game, loved it. It was a bit buggy but that was probably just my computer because it didn't do the same thing on my dad's computer. I didn't like Mona's character though... I thought she was a bit annoying.

I don't usually buy vampire games but this was a parody of vampires and the humor more than made up for it. I'd especially recommend it to Lucas arts point and click adventure fans!

I'm an old-school adventure gamer, and this is one of the good ones, to understate the matter a bit. Yes, this game could have come out in the point-n-click glory days of the early/mid '90s and been a classic even back then. And the graphics - the unbelievably gorgeous, drippingly atmospheric, fantastically fun graphics (especially the lovingly hand-painted backgrounds) - would be reason enough, on their own, to purchase this title. The story is grandly fun, too, and makes you *really* want to keep playing (unlike a lot of the slopped-together, too-short messes being released under the category "adventure games" these days).

Like some other reviewers, I was initially annoyed by Mona's and Froderick's voices, too, but those two are great actors (use intonation in the right places, know how to use their lines to develop their characters, etc.), even if you don't care for their vocal qualities. And they grow on you, honestly. About 1/4 into the game, I really started to feel personally invested in fates of poor Mona and her best bat buddy. The humor, too, is very old-school Sierra-LucasArts-style, and even if 3/4 of the really absurd (and copious, if you do a lot of pointing 'n' clicking) jokes fall flat, quite a few tend to be guffaw-out-loud funny. Even the bad ones make you start to giggle in spite of yourself, as you become more and more thoroughly immersed in the mood of the game.

Some reviewers have mentioned the arbitrariness of some of the item combination puzzles, to which I reply "tsk, tsk" and shake my head sadly. Crazily arbitrary (and thus often hilarious) item combinations are one of the hallmarks of the old point-n-click games, and this one carries on the tradition with glorious finesse. (Also, trying every random item/hot spot combination is a good way to figure out how to go forward when stuck, and also frequently a source of some very funny lines from the characters.)

And, finally, on the topic of mood - this game owes a lot to King's Quest VII's Ooga Booga land, one of my favorite game settings of all time. But AVS expands that kind of setting and kicks it up a notch (with the aforementioned lush graphics), which makes for a very delicious gaming experience.

In short, highly, highly recommended.

Vampyre Story is an adventure point and click game. The artwork is superb and the music is very good too. The spooky surroundings are wonderful to explore.There are tons of tasks that you have to be super creative to figure out. Try all options and talk to everyone. This game has a unique interface where you point on something and have a choice of four options: speak, touch, fly to, and examine, this makes the game very easy to play.Your items are also displayed in a coffin and they are readily available for use. You have to combine a lot of items and things like that so the interface is very simple to handle.I have been playing this with my nine year old and she really has enjoyed it very much. The characters are neat and the artwork keeps it interesting.

I like the humour and really cool backgrounds. I would really like more interaction with some of the lesser characters. I would like it to be longer but if youd play the game there is a sequel coming out i assume. Most of the puzzles are easy to figure out. there is one puzzle that i thought was kinda hard if you dont know how to figure it out. its in a secret cave that you find later on. i would recommend this game to anyone who likes point and click or find objects games. Takes me back to Discworld and Monkey Island and dont forget Kings Qwest series.