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Creepy...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: March 22, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Ok- so when I got this game, I thought it was going to be kind of silly and amusing...I was looking for something fun to play later on in the evening, once the day was through, chores done, etc, and I thought it might be similar to something like the 7th Guest and the 11th hour...Boy, was I wrong! This game, which features Bram Stoker's characters, is beautifully rendered. Game play is smooth- thankfully you get to use the mouse rather than the annoying arrow keys. The graphics are great, and the sounds and music are pretty cool. Rather than just plodding around solving simple logic puzzles, you are collecting clues, combining objects, fighting creatures in an intelligent way and, of course, saving the girl. This game is scary! When you least expect it, something pops out of the darkness- and trust me, there is lots of it here...Try playing late at night, and see if you don't get goosebumps also when you are in the cemetery looking for Dracula's mausoleum...See if you aren't jumpy as you explore the desolate yard of Dracula's Carfax home while the wind is howling, or while you're in the asylum hearing all the mad laughter and mumblings about you ... Gothic without getting too bizzare or obscure! Very neat! A great, entertaining buy!

EXCELLENT !!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: June 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I first purchased the Dracula the Resurrection and even though the graphics were fantastic the game play was a little too short. I was expecting the same with the the Last Sanctuary. Boy was I wrong, not only are the graphics excellent, the gameplay is DRAMATICALLY improved! There are weapons (that you can combine) that can be used and if your not careful, that main character has a chance of losing his life. This feature was not in the first game. There are also very challenging puzzles that do not disappoint. Definitely well worth the money.

Very Good, But Could Be Better.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: November 11, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I enjoyed this game very much, mainly because of the great graphics, decent storyline, and creepy and detailed characters. Although there are a few problems... But first, I'll concentrate on the good aspects of this game.

First of all, this game succeeds in what it's supposed to be: A creepy game with Dracula as the main antagonist. Everything about this game is creepy, from the old dilapidated house filled with shadows and god knows what else, to Dracula's dungeons, filled with a sea of skeletons. The characters are especially creepy. They're downright ugly, and their imagery will remain stuck in your head. Especially the insane Hopkins, who a mother couldn't even love. This game isn't "scary", not really... Although there are a few places in the game (mostly in Carfax, the run-down house) where you will jump a little bit, but mainly those situations are few and far between. This game is mostly creepy... You will get the chills while playing this game, especially late at night.

The graphics are really good, as I've said before. The backgrounds are, at first, really nice to look at, although soon you'll find out that they look a little flat looking... But they still look nice. I do have a complaint about the enemies... They really stand out from the flat backgrounds, so they look unnatural in their surroundings.

There's no music (besides some in the cut scenes), but there's some creepy background noises... Such as creaks, groans, wind, growling, insane laughter... And in some scenes, there's nothing, so it's creepy silence. Basically, I didn't mind that the game didn't have music, because the sounds were enough.

The cut scenes are really nice and add to the storyline well. The only problem I see with them is that the lip-synching is downright horrible. It really throws off the entire thing. Too bad... But the character's voices are really good... The voice actors really put some time into making them just right.

At times you will come across some books, which you can read. If you don't feel like reading, you can just click on the words, and the character that written them will start reading them out loud for you. I liked this function.

Okay, now it's time for the bad things...

This game is really uneven. Most of the puzzles are not very hard, meaning that if you poke and prod long enough, you will come across a solution soon. But, there are a few puzzles in the game that will frustrate you. So, you'll end up doing a really easy puzzle, then go into a really hard one, then end up doing a really easy one again. Another thing about the puzzles that I didn't like was that the solutions to the puzzles lie in items that are really hard to find. Meaning that you'll spend a lot of time moving you cursor all over every scene to try to find that one missing item. This will really frustrate you, so you must have patience if you're going to play this game. The reason the items are so hard to find at times is because they're usually hidden in dark corners where you can't even see the item hardly, and/or because they're small so you'll usually pass over it without seeing your cursor change. 98% of the time I used a walkthrough is when I couldn't find the item, and usually it ended up that the item was right under my nose, which frustrated me.

Another problem I had was the ending... It is bad. The reason it is bad is because it's really easy. You would expect the end to have the hardest puzzles... But it doesn't. In fact, the ending has some of the easiest puzzles in the game. The actual ending cut scenes aren't that bad, but you'll still be saying "Is that it?" after seeing them

Pros: Good graphics, good storyline, good characters, good cut-scenes with good voices, a lot of the puzzles are fun to complete, and it's very creepy. There also aren't that many bugs in it, so don't expect it to crash. In fact, it never crashed on me yet. This game, unlike a lot of other adventure games, does have some replay value. Mainly because it has a decent storyline and settings, so it'll be like going to an old favorite book and rereading it.

Cons: Some of the puzzles are frustrating because the items are hard to find, even though they usually end up being in plain sight, and when you do find the items, the puzzles become very easy. Lip synching is horrible. The ending is bad. The backgrounds are sort of flat, although that wasn't that big of a problem for me. Every time you want to play this game, you have to insert disk 1, even when you're on disk 2, which gets kind of annoying. The game won't take you that long to complete. It took me about a week to do it. It doesn't show how you die... Like for instance, on the chessboard puzzle... If you make one wrong move, a "Game Over" screen will appear, and nothing more.

Overall: It's a very fun game, although it can be frustrating at times. I recommend this game to anybody who likes creepy games, the Dracula story, or who likes adventure games. I generally liked it, in spite of some annoyances. I will be picking up the first game in this series, Dracula Resurrection, because I liked this game. Four stars.

Note: There are some violent scenes, but not that many. Most of the violence is when you plunge a stake through the heart of a vampire, and he fades to dust... But that's it for that. There are also some naked vampire women. (...)So, I don't really recommend this game for younger players.

A terrific improvement from the first game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: April 11, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Dracula 2 is everything the first one wasn't. If you were disappointed with the first, I don't blame you. Although it had wonderful graphics, it was way too short. This game is ten times as long, ten times as challenging, ten times scarier and ten times BETTER! I love it!! There are many beautifully depicted environments to roam and explore freely in, all in a logical, strategy-driven way. The puzzles are challenging, but not impossible or too easy, they are perfect. It picks up right where the first game left off, so I suggest buying the first game as well. The graphics are, without a doubt, the BEST I've ever seen in a PC game. They are absoultely astounding...you really have to see them to believe it. Buy this game - it's cheap and tons of fun that will keep you busy for a long time!!

Pretty darn cool

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: March 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I just bought this game because I'm into the whole horror/thinking game sort of thing. Its a great game, with awesome graphics. Every thing is perfectly clear, and you never know what is going to pop up aroung the next corner. Its a very surprising game, that will keep you wanting to come back, and play some more. I've never played the first game, but you don't really have to have past experience with it, because they give you a bit of history about the last game in the begining, but if you like games where you get to shoot things, and solve puzzles at the same time, then this game is for you.

Nice graphics and sounds, but gameplay is too linear

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: January 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

For the price, this is an entertaining game. It features cool graphics, appropriate sounds effects and a compelling premise: you are Jonathan Harker, and your quest to rid the world of the nefarious Count Vlad Tepes aka Dracula continues.

The styling of the game clearly borrows heavily from the Francis Ford Coppola interpretation of Dracula, as the Harker character seems cloned from the Keanu Reeves (dude) portrayal in that 1992 movie (down to his haircut). The game consists of static screens in which your character (via the cursor) moves and searches for items to further your quest. The cursor changes shape to signify the action you can or need to take (arrow for movement, gear cogs to indicate you need to use an item in your possession, and so on). There are also fully-animated cutscenes with decent voiceovers (bad lip-synch though) as well as animated monsters and other minor scenes.

That said, the major flaw I found was that the game is entirely too linear. In order to proceed to the next room/place/location you must find certain items and solve puzzles with them or combine them to make something happen - without them you're stuck where you are. Many of the items you're required to find tend to be small and not immediately visible (especially since the cursor is a small dot most of the time, and if you don't pass over the item in the right spot the cursor may not change, which is your only indication that the item is something you need). So you may find yourself moving the cursor over every inch of the scene in case you missed something. Your character's viewpoint can move a full 360 degrees horizontally (and 180 degrees vertically) but you can only move in the directions the game needs you too. There's no side exploring of anything interesting you see in the corner, and you can only pick up things the game needs you to (and only if you are facing them the right way). This may be helpful for some gamers but can be quite tedious for others.

Also some of the puzzles you must solve are somewhat unnecessarily long-winded and can be frustrating. I recommend using the walkthrough found on the game's website (especially when you get to a puzzle that you can't solve and realize that you need to go all the way back through several screens and pick up a barely-glimpsed piece of rope that was on the floor next to you, or something like that).

A final minor quibble is that when your character dies you see nothing - no scenes of Jonathan being mauled by a vampire monster or drowning when he stays underwater too long. You simply get a big "Game Over" screen with a picture of Dracula holding his hand out like he's asking you for spare change. Overall the game is worth its price and can provide some reasonable entertainment, particularly if you like creepy locales and themes (the game takes place in, among other locations, an asylum, an abandoned house, a deserted movie theater, cemeteries, a dungeon full of skeletons, and even a room full of fire-breathing dragon's heads). Worth a look, but don't expect to think too much.

Oh well, another turkey

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: April 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I just received my Dracula 2 game from ... today. That's the good news. When you open the box the only thing inside is the jewel case which contains the two CD's and the worlds shortest "manual".

There appears to be no way to change the resolution settings, color settings, sound or anything else. Or re-map the keyboard. Keyboard? There is nothing in the "manual" which shows keyboard assignments. How do you move forward? Who knows. Backwards? Run, walk or jump? Who knows. Want to use mouse invert? Sorry about that.

Having played PC games for a couple of years now I am conditioned to the fact that you're gonna get ... sometimes, and this is one of those times. Think of it this way: I get to have turkey in April, because Dracula 2: the Last Sanctuary is a turkey (and it's not even Thanksgiving yet!).

Man, hide your neck!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: April 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game was Fantastic! I bought the first one and even though I loved the puzzles, I was disappointed that I breezed through it in only 2 days. Then I got this one...OMG! Talk about running out of the room. Everytime I heard a "growl", that was my que to leave the room and gather myself. LOL! The puzzles were fantasic. The graphics were absolutely realistic. The 360 degree movement was perfect for this game. It allowed you to look everywhere~up especially without moving. (Very helpful)

The characters,puzzles, places...and the feelings..all of it..I give it a big thumbs-up!!! Hope there is a third one.

Excellent game, but it has it's flaws.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: August 08, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is the second Dreamcatcher Interactive game I have bought. Excellent quality game for the price. The graphics and sound are excellent. The puzzles aren't too difficult, but clever. The storyline is long enough to enjoy the playing. It does have it's flaws though. The entire game runs from the CD-ROM making acessing the inventory take a minute or so, which is irritating at some points in the game. Also, the movement in the inventory is jerky forcing you to attempt to get an item several time. Overall, though good game and worth the money

Dracula Returns

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Take on the role of Jonathan Harker. Search for clues to find the mystery of Dracula's Sanctuary. Asside from a few major problems this game was quite good. I'll go over the problems first: All the data in the game was read directly off the CD, and that data wasn't precached either (read into memory before being used in the game), so a lot of the time the game takes a while to play a small sound, or display an image. That got somewhat annoying, but ignoring 'that' the game was well done.

The graphics aren't really as amazing as the box might suggest, but they're not bad either. The story was pretty good, even though there was very little spoken dialogue. I think there was some nudity in the game so younger players beware :-).

Some of the puzzles are somewhat discouraging, but if you search every part of every scene thourouhly you'll find what you need. And be sure to try to combine everything with everything else, both in inventory and the scenery.

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