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The game's name sounds like a surprise from the Asian video industry, but Vamp One-Half is an honest shooter from the late nineties that stayed anonymous for almost a quarter century. It's the kind of game you'd order by email from a small publisher and wait for with the hope you only feel these days opening mysterious boxes at a flea market.
It plays in classic top-down perspective like Smash TV or those old arcade hits, except here you're a vampire and your task is to blast and bomb your way through hordes of enemies. The scenario doesn't pretend to be anything that wants to win an Oscar — it's a game that knows what it is and where it belongs. You've got weapons, you've got grenades, you've got enemies. The rest is mechanics you've seen in a hundred games with similar names.
The controls are solid for DOS standards — arrow keys, spacebar to shoot, simple and no unnecessary demanding combinations. What makes playing it so interesting? Actually, nothing dramatic. The levels march forward at one pace, enemy variety is average, and the graphics are standard DOS-era plastic creatures with no character of their own. A star doesn't have to shine for a game to be playable — and Vamp One-Half is exactly that: playable, nothing more.
In the nineties, these shooters competed with hundreds of others. Some had detectives, some had more fun physics, some had stories. Vamp One-Half had a vampire. That wasn't enough. Everyone's forgotten it today and no wonder — it's not a bad game, but it's not one that grabs you and holds on.
Who would want something from it today? Hunters of obscurities and absolutely all DOS arcade games, whether famous or forgotten. It belongs where all personality-free old games belong — in a collection. It's not a puzzle, it's not a challenge, and it's not an experience. It's a game you'll play for half an hour and then it'll vanish from your memory just as fast as it appeared.
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