Buffy the Vampire Slayer Review
Salve, et grata ToriJ Video ludos. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I used to watch this all the time as a kid. It's one of my all time favorite shows, so when I heard there was a game coming out I was ecstatic. Just one problem, I didn't have an Xbox! None of my friends did. It was either PS2 or GameCube. Maybe a couple of people at church had an Xbox, but they certainly wasn't playing Buffy. Only Xbox game I ever heard anyone talk about was Halo. For years this game has eluded me, but not anymore. I'm popping this bad girl in and playing some Buffy!
We start off with Giles explaining the origins of the Slayer. Thoughtful, but unnecessary. Did they really think anyone who wasn't a fan of the show would play this? Oh, well. They make up for it by having the intro play over a series of clips taken from the actual game. If that doesn't get you pumped up for some Slayer dusting action then nothing will.
The first stage of the game is a tutorial level to get you use to the controls and the combat. The combat isn't the worst experience I ever had in a video game, but it could have been loads better. You have an attack button for punching and kicking that you can mix up to perform combos. There's a meter for health, and a meter for your Slayer power. Your Slayer power helps charges up your attacks so you can inflict more damage. When a vampire's health is down to zero you can stake them through the heart to finish them. A stake isn't your only weapon, you can also get things like the crossbow, a gun that shoots holy water or hellfire, and an awesome Reaper Blade that Giles hands to you later in the game.
Everyone and their mother can block in this game except for you. The best thing you can hope for is to be able to dash out of the way, but it's nearly impossible to get out of the way in time before you're hit. If an enemy is either punched, or moves out of the way mid-combo Buffy is just going to be standing there like a jackass hitting air. This allows the computer to get a punch in, and they only need one or two hits to knock you on your ass. Some vampires can even perform magic to stun you. Others will just throw bottles of hellfire at you. I enjoy watching it blow up in their faces when it leads to their death. Unfortunately, you can't throw any bottles of hellfire yourself. You can only combine it with your arrows or gun like you can with holy water. Just once I would like to play a game where the computer doesn't have a cheap advantage over you to make it challenging.
I hope you enjoy hearing the same lines over and over again, because this game is notorious for some of the laziest voice recordings I've ever heard. Buffy and vampires alike will repeat the same lines with little variation in-between. Do you know how many times I heard “You can't win, Slayer. There's only one of you and an endless supply of us?” Too many times! In one cut-scene the vampire doesn't even get his own lines, he just recites one of the gameplay dialogs. How lazy is that? Way to cut corners, guys. Even the game got sick of hearing it because I lost the sound a quarter of the way through. Because who wants a working game? I had to reboot the Xbox to get it working again.
One thing they didn't cut corners on was getting the actors from the show. All of the cast members minus Sarah Michelle Gellar and the original actor that played The Master reprise their roles. Buffy is voiced by Giselle Loren who does a pretty impressive impersonation of S.M.G. The Master is voiced by D.C. Douglas, who is probably best known for his work as Albert Wesker in Resident Evil 5. He doesn't try to emulate Mark Metcalf, and I think his performance is all the better for it. While we're on the subject of The Master:
The Master is being resurrected from the spirit world and it's up to Buffy and the Scooby Gang to put a stop to it. Bringing back The Master was probably the obvious choice because of his relationship with Buffy. I don't think any of the other villains in the show, sans Angelus, has ever come close to getting under Buffy's skin. Just seeing her reaction to him being back says it all. Nothing in the game contradicts anything from the show, so I think it can be considered c anon at this point. The Master's death rate is the same as Buffy's.
Enemies you can encounter in the game include vampires (duh), skeletons (don't remember those in the show), zombies, and of course, demons. In addition to Spike you can also face a possessed Angel, and The Master himself. Two boss fights involve vamps who can shapeshift into animals; a serpent and a lion. Easily the hardest of the two is the serpent, and that's only because you have to open up parts of Angel's house to let the sun in to kill the bitch. You can't just stake her. The easiest boss fight is with the first Dreamer you face. The game builds them up as these big bads that can manipulates reality itself, and then you kill one of them in just a few punches. Talk about overrated.
My favorite part of the game is when you're in the library talking to the main cast. We have Willow, Xander, Giles, and Cordelia. Eventually, even Angel and Spike gets some time in the library. Oz is mentioned as absent. I'm guessing they couldn't get Seth Green, and while Dru does appear in the game she has no lines, so I'm guessing they couldn't get her actress either. A minor setback when you have so many of the main cast in the game at a time where both Buffy and Angel were still on the air. Willow sends you on the path to find power crystals to strengthen you, Xander gives you the squirt gun to help kill vamps (I forget what it's called, but for all intent and purposes, it's a squirt gun), and Giles gives you new combos you can use in battle. You can even talk to each characters several times until they start to wonder what you're still doing there. Gotta love it.
You know what's bulltrout? Being able to die in water! That's right, all Buffy has to do is fall in any body of water and you get a game over. If an enemy even so much as knocks you into it, you're dead. You're telling me that Buffy doesn't know how to swim? She never thought that might be a handy skill? “I'm Buffy, Vampire Slayer. I ain't getting on no boat!”
The camera in this game jumps all over the place. You'll be trying to perform a simple task like pushing a switch while fighting a boss, and you can hardly see where it is because the camera is fixed on the boss. Then the developers decided that platforming needed to be added to the game, so you're wrestling with the camera just to line up your jump. This was not a game made for platforming. You have a hard enough time just lining Buffy up to grab onto a pipe.
There are a couple of weapons you can pick up like the mop in the above picture. Other weapons include a shovel, a spike, and a sledgehammer. The sledgehammer is without a doubt the best weapon in the whole game. You can just slam it into the enemy repeatedly and smash a vampire's head in. A lot of the weapons have their own health meter, and when the meter runs out the weapon breaks.
Another thing I like about this game is that it changes Buffy's clothes through levels. How many times does a video game character changes clothes? Almost never. Even Xander is wearing something different depending on the day. Not Willow, though. Willow doesn't have to change anything. She's Willow.
In closing, would I play it again? No. No I wouldn't. In fact, I wished I never played this piece of trout to begin with! I like the story. I like that most of the actors from the show reprise their roles, and it feels like an episode, but that where the good things end. The gameplay mechanics are horrible. No matter how good you get at the combat you're just going to be punching air every time. Enemies will glitch into the ground keeping you from killing them. This isn't a video game, it's a Slayer life simulator. This game was created to show you how much being the Vampire Slayer smurfing sucks! If you're a Buffy fan and you never played this game before, do yourself a favor and YouTube it! You're more likely to have a much more enjoyable experience watching someone else suffer through this game than playing it yourself.
Skip it
