Dracula 2 - The Last Sanctuary

Unfortunately, I haven't played the first episode of this game, which is something I'll have to remedy, preferably soon. I usually don't like first person adventures (for a number of reasons which I'd rather not go into right now) so there's probably no greater compliment for this game than for me to tell you that it's absolutely great.

Story

We pick up the story where we left off at the end of the first episode. Jonathan is taking Mina back to London to rest and meanwhile he plans to destroy Dracula's stronghold there. He knows the only way for Mina to survive is by destroying the Count himself, so he sets out to demolish Dracula's sanctuaries one by one, forcing the Count into his Last Sanctuary where he will no longer have anywhere else to run. Unfortunately he doesn't count on the prey taking on the role of the predator.

Opinion

First of all, let me give you an overall impression of the game before I go into specifics. As I said in the intro part, I'm not too fond of first person adventure games for various reasons so just the fact that I was willing to sit down and play this game says a lot about it. Let me tell you, I was in no way disappointed. The Last Sanctuary is a gorgeous horror game with a very good story, an easy to use player interface and hours and hours of fun. It's a game you'll want to finish not just to get the whole thing over with but to finally see how the story ends.

Now for the specifics. It was very hard rating the graphics as there are two, well separable graphic types in the game. One is the usual ingame graphics where we can move our heads and look around in 360 degrees on one specific screen. I believe the game uses Cryo's Omni3D engine for that, just like you've seen in Faust and many other games. The other type of graphics is the cutscenes. I ended up giving a 9 for overall graphics because while the video sequences are (save for a couple of exceptions) breathtaking and off my scale, the more common ingame graphics often tend to be a bit repetitive and some of the pictures are very low resolution and seem like VGA graphics instead of SVGA.

I won't waste time trying to describe the music, or the story for that matter. The music is everything you could expect from a game like this, which is to say it sets the mood expertly but you won't find yourself wandering around the place just to listen to the beautiful score, like in some other games. The story is pretty much the standard vampire plot so there's nothing to explain. I'm sure I won't shatter anyone's illusion if I tell you know that in the end you'll have to kill Dracula. Still, there were some moments in the plot that were a little bit surprising and a nice touch from the writers, so they definitely deserve some credit. Also, I think the puzzles were outstanding in both design and in cleverness. The necessary clues were there every time but they were still always challenging and there were very few pixel hunts, which I've come to expect from first person games of this type.

The ending was a bit of a disappointment, I'm afraid. I expected the tension to build up towards the end, but it didn't. The story held as much excitement (if not more) in the beginning than at the end. It's really a shame, because the end should always be the climax of the game and this story was beautifully built for a huge final battle. Sadly, killing Dracula seemed a very easy task compared to the test of forces I'd been expecting.

One of the biggest mistakes in design, at least for me, was that the game only allows us to save 8 saved games and no more. There are only 8 slots and when they're filled, you're going to have to overwrite one of your earlier saves. I'm sure I'm not the only person who keeps his/her own saved games after an adventure game but with Dracula, that's almost impossible. There are several parts in the game where you can die (quite easily, I might add) so anybody who can make it through with just 8 saves for the first time is superhuman in my eyes.

And one final comment on the ending. I think that the choice of Dracula's last words: "Is this really the end?", was a huge mistake on the writers' part (or was it the marketing director, I wonder) and kind of spoiled even the last bits of dramatic effect they were able to build up for that point.