The game is full of tributes to all manner of FPS brethren, such as Half-Life, Halo and Medal of Honour. There are scenes of 'Boy galloping across open desert, on lumpen horses, but because it's usually grim and dark, a necessity of the Vam', it ends up being satisfying in neither context. In practice, the attempt to blend two styles has produced a look which is dark and eminently forgettable. It wishes to appear to be some horrific chimera aesthetic between cowboy and vampire, which it only delivers in the loosest sense. From thence until tedium, it's vampire-slashing all the way, with your slow descent into and battle against the forces of yawnsomely familiar gaming territory. I am become vampire!), and that's all the plot. It is close to us.Ī short while after, your new woman-at-arms screeches at you in the most unconvincing way some other absurd contrivance, (Oh noes! That have feasted on my sweetmeats. It's curious how often that happens in games. When you blow open the safe, only narrowly unimpeded by an angry and oddly-modelled woman who later turns out to be a colleague, you discover that you have unleashed a great evil on the world. This you dutifully do, as the rubbish creatures waddle in waves of gittish embarrassment towards you, and you hack them to death. Once you have control of your twitchy cowboy, you are dumped at the start of a train and told to fight your way through vampires and blow open a hatch. That kind of voice isn't conducive to listening. The wannabe-it-was-a-time-for man growls his way though some badly written nonsense about, well, vampires probably. The game opens with its laughably bad voice-over. Having a concept - 'It's like a vampire shooter, but with, wait for it (snicker), COWBOYS!' - is not enough, except for the most diehard of VamBoy fans. The problem is, what with the end-of-generation malaise that inevitably sets in, we're jaded and restless, and if you're going to do an FPS, you have to do something big, spectacular and special. So you decide to do something different instead? Don't be silly. There hasn't been a decent vampire shooter since mankind crawled out of the soup, nor a truly landmark cowboy shooter, either. It was time for all of those things, with more cowboys and vampires. It was a time for bad voice actors to try to sound like that man who does all the film trailers in that stupid voice.

It was a time for war, heroes, vampires and cowboys.

Darkwatch 2 ps2