From Dusk Till Dawn Review

For one reason or another, relatively few movies get video games made after them. And even if it happens, the video game usually gets published immediately after the movie, while the hype is still on. In this particular case, Gamesquad (the developers) decided to make a game after a five-year-old movie. I am not quite sure whether it was an attempt to revive the legendary Rodriguez/Tarantino movie or if they just wanted to make some quick cash following the European DVD release...

What I do know, however, is that my impressions after watching the film had nothing to do with my impression after playing this game. I can only say that I liked the movie, that it seized my full attention, and that I had to see it more than once, and as for the game, I really had to make myself play on. It took me an entire month to finally get to put all my experiences about this game into a review...

First things first, let's clear one thing: The game isn't the same as the movie plot. You won't have to cross the Mexican border, fight vampire truckers in the Titty Twisters motel, or see the famous Salma Hayek snake dance... for that matter; you won't see practically anything from the movie. One movie character you will have at your disposal is Seth Gecko (George Clooney). Now, imagine that some time passed since the events in the movie, and that Seth somehow ended up on a prison ship "Rising Sun" which takes him to the execution site. (Un)fortunately for him, once the doors of his cell opened, in came a couple of bulky guards with an intention to bring him to the gas chamber, but before you know it, all hell breaks loose, and Seth is suddenly covered in policeman and prisoner blood and guts, feeling that familiar presence of vampires in the air. The vampires came to free their old friend and make a decent blood fest while they're at it. It will be up to you to make sure that you don't get to be the main dish...

Now, the story may not seem too bad, but... the 3D engine is heavily outdated; the game uses an updated version of the so called THEO engine, which had been designed for the Devil Inside. The graphics look decent at first sight, but as soon as you start noticing flaws... I had frame-rate glitches, which seemed really stupid concerning my hardware and the graphics quality. Players with more than 900Mhz probably won't even notice this, but if you happen to have a 500-600Mhz CPU, you'll have a very inconsistent frame rate whenever you enter a bigger room or have several characters on-screen. The glitches are obviously caused by higher polygon counts, but I just want to point out that even those higher polygon counts are not really high in comparison to practically anything we had the chance to see over the last couple of years: the environments are extremely simple, and the same goes for the characters including the hero. With all this in mind, it is good that they did not set the game in Titty Twisters, 'cause it would be a real shame seeing Salma with a low poly-count. Collision detection is also pathetic: you will frequently be able to look through walls or doors, which can be a bit confusing.

The enemies are, of course, vampiric monsters. You will start off fighting some zombies, and big wall-crawling vampires, and as you progress, you will be introduced to some more avant-garde forms of vampires, ones that look like a Frankenstein with wings etc... Some of them are unarmed, some will try to spit some acid at you, but the most dangerous of them will wield weapons with great proficiency. Their appearance is truly intimidating, unlike their AI... Basically all of them act like zombies, slow and stupid. When they have a goal in sight, they simply go towards it. Occasionally though, they can start to act in a very strange fashion: they start jumping around running in circles or hitting the wall for no obvious reason. Still who could tell what is going on in their disturbed little minds.