Vampire Rain starts with the promising notion of mashing up stealth-combat gameplay with ultra-dangerous vampires. Protagonist John Lloyd is, for all stylistic purposes, a Fearless Vampire Hunter version of Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher, right down to the fashion sense.

The majority of gameplay is centered on navigating an unforgivingly-strict path as you creep through street levels, scale and skulk along walls, sight your enemies and slink past them. The vampires just sit there at the fringes, like bloodsucking lumps -- there's not much in the way of crafty stealth-oriented artificial intelligence; and if you screw up, the vampires will, far more often than not, simply waste you immediately, sending your sorry exsanguinated carcass right back to the beginning of the level -- minus any medals or useful items you managed to collect.

The level design somehow manages to be confusing and linear at the same time while the combination of the high player mortality rate and the near-unkillable nature of the vampire enemies make for a level of frustration that goes way beyond the concept of game "difficulty." The rare attainment of weapons that actually do some good only serve the throw the uselessness of standard weapons into sharp relief. It's blood-feast or famine, here.

A large part of the problem revolves around the stealth-scheme "vision cones" of the enemy Nightwalkers, the preset fields of view in which they can see you: Since you can't rely on them to be accurate, consistent, or even existent, it's always a crapshoot whether the shadows you're hiding in or not will actually hide you from those who wish to kill you (or whether you might be able to blithely walk by a supposedly-alert Nightwalker) -- and if they do see you, you're pretty much dogmeat. They will hunt you down relentlessly and with speed and tenacity that can only be called unfair. You can't even take your lumps and learn from the experience before running to safety, since one or two of their slashes will kill you.

Later on, it gets a tad less ludicrous and frustrating, as you can acquire a sniper rifle and a special knife that increase your chances of offing the enemy -- but even these new toys require scarce ammo and you aren't allowed to hold onto them from level to level in any case.

It's almost a mercy here that gameplay is continually intruded upon by cutscenes. And while the game is certainly bloody enough, it never gets a chance to work up any real horror-tension or even spooky ambiance. And that's just bad.

A collection of gameplay types beyond the main campaign challenge players with mini-objectives, but they feel wimpy and rather tacked-on (a shame, because some of these challenges are actually superior to the primary story levels). Multiplayer -- what there is of it -- includes standard 8-player deathmatches, capture the flag/flame, and destroy-the-target schemes (and to the multiplayer scheme's credit, players are allowed to be agents or, in some cases, vampires).

Vampire Rain just never manages to pull the gameplay experience together into a coherent, functioning whole. Even hard-core vampire enthusiasts will have a hard time sinking their teeth into this one.