The Haunted Hoard: Dracula: Crazy Vampire (Game Boy Color)

With an absurd name like Dracula: Crazy Vampire, the first question about this game has to be what makes Dracula so crazy that the tile deems it his most noteworthy feature.  Perhaps this could be some sort of indicator that this is a radically different take on the count, or maybe its to tell kids in the 1990s Dracula was being given an extreme makeover to make him cooler, but while the box art seems to hint at some shift away from the classic horror icon’s typical depiction, the game offers no actual answers on what makes him so crazy. In fact, Dracula’s depiction in this game is incredibly by the book, presenting him as the watered down family friendly vampire that would be perfect as a Halloween decoration, almost a complete inversion of anything crazy or out of the norm.

The plot doesn’t really try to do anything outlandish either. Dracula has been sleeping for years and awakes to find someone called the Grand Inquisitor has seized power during his absence. Dracula sets off to take him down, but to defeat him he must search around for support from other vampires who can help him reach the final battle. Along the way, Dracula will face foes from the familiar stable of Halloween horrors as well as regular but well-armed humans and just some overly aggressive wildlife like rats and scorpions. However, Dracula has one and only one way of dealing with them, and that’s flinging bats at them until they die. Most enemies take one bat to stun and another bat to put them down for good, but if Dracula is running low on health, he can choose to finish them off by draining their blood if they’re one of the eligible enemy types. This blood draining mechanic means that most of the actually dangerous enemies are not really big threats, as if they do hit you, you can quickly attack them back and drain their health so it is as if the battle never happened. The screen is incredibly close to the action as well, so if a foe is visible and able to attack you, then you’re already no doubt close enough to spot them and quickly launch some bats at them in retaliation. If anything, the awkward lurching of the camera as it tries to follow your movements is a bigger concern than the baddies it might reveal.

The only real fights with any strategy to them in this game are the boss battles, and that’s only true of some of them. The early bosses are just about not standing where they can attack you and attacking them while they’re open. They can take more than two bats to defeat, but the battles are monotonous and just require you to not die as you gradually whittle down foes that challenge your patience more than your skill. The later bosses do at least ask you to do something different, with the final boss actually requiring timing and baiting of your enemy to overcome, but it can’t make up for the fact that getting there required endless mindless bat flinging or the even worse aspect of the game: finding your way through boring maze-like levels.

When the game begins, Dracula doesn’t even have the ability to throw bats. All he can do is run around until he finds the right character to talk to, and after that, all he does is run around and fire bats at the occasional enemy. Dracula: Crazy Vampire is presented in a top-down perspective that is incredibly zoomed in and the game gives you no map, so having a good idea of where you are in relation to the level as a whole is difficult. There are small variations in appearance between areas of a level but they still draw from the same imagery and small set of objects to break up the wall and floor design. Most of your time in Dracula: Crazy Vampire is not spent taking down dogs, wizards, and knights, but instead running about an area and looking for either an exit or a key to open up a path that will eventually get you to an exit. Areas with multiple floors are the worst, as not only do they sometimes place key items just on whatever floor they like, but you are bound to backtrack through these labyrinthine locations as actions in one place will open up paths in another. There are switches to activate through the most basic means of block pushing, and I would not use the word puzzle to describe them as they are just switches with a bit more flavor to them than just pressing a button. Levels gradually get larger and larger and require more steps to complete, leading to covering the same ground more and more in levels that don’t actually ask anything of the player except for them to just run around until they come across something important looking. There are a few levels that are more simply designed and thus not quite as offensive, but the bulk of them adhere to the maze style of stage design. One small mercy to alleviate the visually similar areas is that if you kill an enemy, they stay dead, so you can start marking areas as complete by killing all the enemies in them and trying to find the places that still have baddies. Otherwise, it’s just about running around until something new is discovered.

There are nearly some interesting ideas to the level exploration. Dracula is a vampire, and while his craziness is in question, he still has his familiar aversion to sunlight, and Dracula’s journey is taking him not just to castles and gloomy forests, but out into open grasslands and even the desert during daylight. Shade is present for these locations, but Dracula will have to run into the light to move forward, and when he does, first he has a special resistance bar drain that can be gradually refueled by standing in the dark or by picking up special power-ups. If that bar is depleted though, the game starts slowly robbing him of health, and since vampires will only help Dracula if he has at least half his max health when he finds them, this could almost be where you actually can’t rely on your bloodsucking to cover for the damage you take. No level really tests the limits of this system too much though, especially since you can always stand in shade wherever you find it and rebuild your meter. It does refill horrendously slow though to discourage just sitting and waiting, but this also means that this process is boring but required. It could be deadly to ignore this meter entirely, but a player who knows about it should never actually receive much damage from it, and instead their patience to recover is tested rather than their skill. A better execution of the idea is found in areas with dangerous flooring that Dracula must cross. He takes much quicker damage here and it’s immediate instead of following another meter, and sometimes Dracula must step into these spots to make progress in the level.

If you do manage to die, Dracula: Crazy Vampire reveals it only gave you one life to beat the game with and will immediately give you a game over, but you can hop back into whatever level you were at thanks to a password system. It’s not likely to come up, especially since the game also gives you power-ups like the ability to take extra hits without taking damage at all. Whether you’ll want to keep going is another question though, because even though some new enemies and hazards are gradually added to stages, there’s not much to enjoy about them. Very few changes along the way really shift the gameplay approach you’ll take, save making you run around a lot more as the levels grow in size and the amount of gated off areas you must open increases. The low level of difficulty is the greatest mercy of the affair, because even though things are dull, they don’t ask much of the player. While technically meaning this is more accessible to young audiences because of this, the game is still a bit too mind-numbing to really excite a child.

THE VERDICT: Dracula: Crazy Vampire is an incredibly tame and bland adventure were most every problem is solved by walking around a lot or throwing some bats at it. Too late the game whips out boss battles and level design elements that could have been interesting, as most of the affair involves you easily defeating any foe you encounter and then trudging through empty room upon empty room, many with identical appearances to make finding your way about even more tedious. Very few ideas like Dracula being weak to the sun in levels that require moving around during the day are seen to their potential and instead just contribute to the slow crawl that is making any degree of progress. Dracula: Crazy Vampire’s barren worlds and poor excuses for gameplay means there isn’t anything to excite you as you push through the generally unrewarding experience.

And so, I give Dracula: Crazy Vampire for the Game Boy Color…

A TERRIBLE rating. Despite just how wrong everything is done in Dracula: Crazy Vampire, it’s not a game that is truly hopeless. It’s devotion to having big character sprites means the camera has to be zoomed in too close, but if it was pulled back a lot more, navigation could be done more reasonably. If enemies didn’t all fall to the same attack strategies, they might be interesting to engage with, and if the damage dealt by opponents was harder to recover from, then there would be some threat to facing one as well. Right now it seems like the levels are mazes just for the sake of being long, but tweaking the more interesting obstacles like the damaging floor and sunlight can make finding the way to the exit more than mindless meandering. Mechanics in Dracula: Crazy Vampire COULD work, but they don’t because they must be compatible with the limitations of the Game Boy Color’s small screen. Many aspects of this game should be balanced in consideration of each other, but instead they are rammed together and very few of them survive contact.

Combat is too easy since it asks hardly anything of the player with ample healing opportunities and meaningless variation, navigation takes too long because you can hardly find your way around bland areas… Dracula: Crazy Vampire may live up to its odd name in one small way. The tedium of the title may very well be able to drive a player crazy.