Game Review #2: Bram Stoker's Dracula

I'm going to be blunt when I say that some companies shouldn't make games. Either that, or all companies should be required to create and develop games to a standard of quality. The following game, by just about all accounts, wasn't.



For those of you who don't know (and I seriously doubt there are many of you that read this that do), Bram Stoker's Dracula was released in 1993 by Sony Imagesoft for the consoles of the time, and was developed by Traveler's Tales. Traveler's Tales is responsible for a handful of movie & tv show game adaptations in the past fifteen years and more recently the LEGO Star Wars/Batman/Indie series.

Unlike the LEGO games, which are actually fun from what I've experienced, Bram Stoker's Dracula was boring and badly-coded. This is something to be expected from books turned movies turned games, but I was willing to give it a shot considering how awesome the source material was.

1. Plot

What can be explained here? It's based off of the Columbia pictures movie adaptation of the classic novel, except formatted to fit into a 16-stage action platforming game. Not much to explain beyond that. Something I didn't learn until after looking up the movie, however, is that Keanu Reeves played Johnathan Harker in the movie, and you play as Harker throughout the entire game.

2. Gameplay

Here's where the game goes bad. The developer must have been in a rush to get the game out, or just didn't care to release a good game because this platformer just generally isn't above mediocre. It has the classic staples: Form of close/long range combat (Harker's sword and projectiles), lives, a hit point system (show as red-filled vials instead of a bar), and a useless score bit.



It may have sixteen stages, but they're all rather short for a platformer. On top of that, combat is dull. Harker's sword hit box is a tad small, and is absolutely useless for hitting enemies beneath him while moving at a downward angle.

Basic concept of each stage depends on what kind of stage there is. The quicker ones have you look for Van Helsing, which causes projectile items to appear on the stage, then find the exit. Even quicker stages than that are ones that remove the Van Helsing bit and just have the end. The third type replaces finding Helsing with fighting a boss.

That brings me to my next irritation: how absolutely easy the bosses are, not to mention how vague it is as to who they are. I had to look at a walkthrough to find out that the first boss was Dracula's carriage driver, for example. Before that I had assumed it was just a really bad shot at one of the Belmonts from Castlevania. But yeah, the difficulty. When the final boss of a game can be defeated by sitting at one side of a plain rectangle room and spamming your sword until Dracula runs into it enough times to die is just pathetic, even with the bad hit detection and small amount of life you get. The platforming of the game is harder than any fighting involved.

3. Graphics

They were alright for the time, but could have used some more time in making them.

4. Music

Eh, what can you expect from something that could be considered yesteryear's shovelware? I just didn't care for it.

Overall, it could have been a much better game. However, it's a general unwritten rule that movie to game adaptations generally just suck. For what it's worth, it was a change of pace from a Castlevania game, and had some different bosses in it. Like a fifteen-foot tall man wrapped in bandages that vomited spiders at you.

Final Score: 4.0