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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. When the game begins, Dracula doesn’t even have the ability to throw bats. 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. 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 early bosses are just about not standing where they can attack you and attacking them while they’re open. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. However, Dracula has one and only one way of dealing with them, and that’s flinging bats at them until they die. 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. 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. Dracula has been sleeping for years and awakes to find someone called the Grand Inquisitor has seized power during his absence. The plot doesn’t really try to do anything outlandish either. 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. 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. 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.
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