Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Written by Dan Clarke on 10/17/2002 for Xbox  

Let me say I really enjoy Buffy : the videogame. As you can imagine, the goal of the game is to defeat evil in the town of Sunnydale, California. Of course you’re defeating evil in the form of vampires. You’ll need a trusty stake to kill these baddies and as Buffy Summers you’ll have to get by with a little help from your friends.

Buffy the video game is a lot like Buffy the TV series. All of your friends are here, Willow, Giles and Xander, which really makes the game feel like you’re watching TV.

Control of Buffy makes the game a lot of fun. Not only can you just beat up an enemy, you can also stake an enemy and throw them too. Nothing beats throwing a bad vampire into another bad vampire and then driving a stake through them. Now that’s entertainment!

In addition, you can use ‘slayer moves’ which give your attacks an extra punch. Finally there’s ‘super slayer moves’ and I bet you can guess what they do…

In this game you’ll see some levels you may have seen on TV, including the high school, the cemetery, the Spanish mission and others. The high school is my personal favorite – nothing like re-living those old school memories with a stake in hand. Okay, so maybe everyone wasn’t a vampire in high school, but still…

Graphics in the game are decent, but dark. You’ll definitely have to turn up the brightness on your TV to see what exactly is going on most of the time – yes I know it’s dark at night, but not this dark!

The sound is spooky and pretty darn good. Voice acting is very good as well with most of the original cast doing the speaking. Some of the one liners are redundant ‘hmm sharp..pointy…” over and over and OVER again—but they are humorous and aren’t as annoying as John Madden saying “hey, try this one”.

As seems to be the case with any third person game, the camera needs to auto center somewhat better on you. Yes you can control the camera with the thumbstick but when you are in the middle of a fight and you get hit from behind and yet you can’t see what the heck it you, it sure can get frustrating fast.

Grading Buffy as a game was a pretty difficult task. The game is a lot of fun and very reminiscient of the TV show, so I wanted to give it a high rating. On the other hand, the camera can be so damn frustrating and playing the same level over and over again combined with when you do finish the game there’s no real reason to go back and play it really hurts the game, so I settled on a 70 rating. If you’re already a Buffy fan, I think you’ll really appreciate the game. Hopefully there will be a Buffy spinoff (Angel, anyone) and this game will be much better the second go-round.