PlayStation Basement #9 - Countdown Vampires

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on October 27th, 2018. It has been edited slightly for formatting.

It’s Halloween next week, so I’m here in the PlayStation Basement with another horror game. Every Saturday I’m here to review strange and obscure games for the original PlayStation using a nine-point scale where 7-9 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad. Let’s get to it.

In the last two weeks, I reviewed Oh! Bakyuuun and Swagman, both horror-related games but not the much touted “survival-horror”. Personally, I think survival-horror is kind of a goofy name, as it’s more marketing than anything else. Once “Resident Evil” came out, these games certainly had a very specific style, but at heart, these are adventure games with action elements. Countdown Vampires is no different. Developed by K2 and published by Bandai, Countdown Vampires was released December 22nd, 1999 in Japan and August 21st, 2000 in the United States. This game tells the tale of Detective Keith J. Snyder’s attempts to save the Desert Moon casino and hotel from a sudden outbreak of vampirism.

The cover art is pretty nice for both versions. The American version has an appropriate late-90s feel to it with a black and red color scheme, a vampire with spiked hair, some bright and abstract lights, and small images from the game. The title has the “word-within-a-word” effect that was popular then too. The Japanese version of Countdown Vampires cover has a minimalist design - a red background with black blood splatters and large yellow katakana characters. I prefer the US cover over the Japanese (the Japanese one is a little harsh), but they are both suitable.

The in-game graphics don’t work as well as the cool designs of the cover art might let on. As with the Resident Evil and Final Fantasy games on the PlayStation, Countdown Vampires uses pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D models of the characters moving about. The backgrounds here are a little worse than those other examples, though the casino looks decent at times. The backgrounds are less detailed than what I expected, and the camera angles are terrible. There is often a very small viewpoint, causing numerous cheap attacks from enemies or blind shooting from the player. The blind shots aren’t the worst, as the player character auto-aims. The enemies also move, though. And I have to say, the enemies, or any of the other 3D characters, don’t look particularly good, especially for such a late release game. The characters have stiff movements and lack the details of games such as Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 3. It’s especially showing seeing the vampires dash at you so stiffly or seeing the hero pour “white water” on the vampires, something that should change them back to humans, but seeing no change with the enemy graphics except for them to stop moving. Keith Snyder himself looks ridiculous with his shirtless, tribal-tattoo aesthetic, though it does match the setting of 1999 well, so I kind of like it. The vampires are nothing special, though they have some very wrinkly faces. It’s all very silly really. The cutscenes are actually pretty decent and especially cinematic. All the goofy details don’t do them justice.

Countdown Vampires does not impress me with its sound effects or music. The music sits in the background and does nothing memorable, composed of short phrases that repeat or loud sound effects of wind. It has a vague resemblance to the music in Goldeneye. The sound effects include cheap sounding gunshots, rattles, falls, and the like. Much of the sound is tinny. I do like the vampire cries, but they are way over the top and happen too often. When anybody actually talks, the game really falters with some of the worst voice-acting I have ever heard. The characters are stilted and monotone and lack the cheesy lines of the first Resident Evil, though it’s not as bad as House of the Dead 2. The translation itself is at fault, showcased moreso by overall flat text descriptions and the occasional high strangeness such as “Use the color bar as a standard to adjust TV brightness. Improved brightness increases game enjoyment.” The brightness I had the TV at seemed adequate, but those instructions sure weren’t a help.

Unfortunately, the gameplay of Countdown Vampires is dry as a bone. Just like the graphics and sound, it’s subpar. You have the standard “tank controls” that you see in most of these survival-horror games. I don’t have much of an issue with that, and it works well if the camera angles are designed with care. Since these camera angles are a mess, it doesn’t work so well. I got frustrated with how many enemies the game throws at you in these poorly constructed environments. As I mentioned above, it’s either shoot blindly or run out into the open and get attacked by four or five fast monsters. Once you are out there with them, you have to do some tedious stuff like run behind a table, let the monsters try to get around it poorly while you shoot at them, run behind another table, and repeat. These vampires take tons of shots to down. Once the vampires are on you, they swarm you and hit you repeatedly (thankfully, you do have the health to spare). It really shows why the slow-moving zombies in Resident Evil were a good idea.

Even when I was not being swarmed by the undead the rooms are confusing from the bad camera angles. The player can purchase a map from a map machine (like you see in any big building, y’know?) and navigate with that. There is no map at all if you don’t buy one. The map is fine, though the way it displays already explored rooms confused me at first.

Every item in Countdown Vampires, including keys, is displayed in the game world as a yellow box. Resident Evil was able to show first-aid sprays, herbs, and ammo with their own graphics; here we just get a yellow box. It confused me at first – I thought the yellow boxes were all ammo, thinking back to the red boxes in Resident Evil 2. I guess K2 couldn’t be bothered with those kinds of details.

K2 couldn’t be bothered with other important details too. Unlike these other games I keep mentioning or many RPGs, Countdown Vampires rarely has descriptions for items in the environment. The Resident Evil games allowed the player to check corpses, desks, shelves, bathtubs, bushes, towels, cupboards, and other places. Even if there was not an item there, the game would display a humorous or eerie detail, enhancing the environment or mood. Sometimes checking a seemingly innocuous area could cause monsters to appear or there might be something you could interact with that was amusing. Without these little details, and with the other problems, Countdown Vampires feels hollow and plain.

There is some stuff here that’s kind of cool. You can collect money and buy stuff from vending machines and play casino games. That’s kind of neat. You can switch weapons and reload without opening the menu. The menu looks pretty cool. There are decent puzzles to open locked areas. There’s an email system that provides some extra story elements, and there are some unlockable modes for completing the game quickly. There’s a big misstep too; when you rescue people by dousing them in white water, you would think there might be some kind of sequence where the character might get up and give you an item, give you information, or speak some words before running off. I didn’t see this happen once; they just lay there. The vampire stops moving and just lays there. Maybe this happens at some point, as I must mention that unlike every other Playstation Basement game which I completed or got almost to the end of (the latter only being one game – last week’s Swagman), I didn’t play Countdown Vampires that long. Maybe this game gets considerably better as it goes on into a fantastic realm that doesn’t involve circling tables and shooting at annoyingly voices humanoid monsters. Maybe one day I’ll get further in this game and see some of the later monsters and what befalls our handsome, George-Clooney-in-From Dusk Till Dawn-esque hero. Oh, and in case you are wondering, “Countdown” in the title just refers to the timed events in the game, something that is not at all a key element to Countdown Vampires or exclusive to this game even within the context of survival-horror. What a product this whole thing is.

Countdown Vampires is uninspired at best and a mess at the worst. The bad camera angles, swarming enemies, and lack of features that encourage exploration or horror drive a stake thru this Resident Evil clone. I bought this game thinking I would like it, and, while I do not regret my purchase, it did not turn out as I hoped it would. The game might be interesting to hardcore survival-horror fans as a curiosity, but I would not recommend Countdown Vampires to anyone.

Countdown Vampires receives a rating of Bad (3).

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