Facebook Vampire Wars Review

This review takes a look at the Facebook Application, Vampire Wars. Vampire Wars is one of the more popular games created by Zynga. It had quite a bit of promise, but with that came high expectations. This guide should explain the type of game Vampire Wars is, and let you make the decision on whether or not to play it.

This review of Facebook's application, Vampire Wars, does its best to vet a good game, with several flaws. I have rated the game using three categories, Gameplay, Graphics and Multiplayer.

Below there are the following sections. First we have a description of the game, followed by an overview of this review, then detailed looks into all three of the categories that I have described above. Then we close the review with a summary, and some important links.

Description of the Game: A text based, vampire game played on a social network. Starts off with rich storyline, has several unique features that make it special.

Overview of the Review: Breaks the review down, and gives a synopsis of each category.

Three Categories: More detail on why each section received the score it received.

Summary: Closes the review, and gives my conclusion on the game Vampire Wars.

Vampire Wars is a Vampire themed, text based game, that involves some number crunching in order to be successful. It puts you in a world where you and your friends are Vampires. This includes all of your friends on Facebook (who play Vampire Wars, and add you to their Clan). A player starts out by doing several tasks in an introduction to the game, and these tasks become the game. A player completes missions, with energy, for blood and moves up to dominating Minions for sustained income. The player then uses this income to buy bigger and better skills from the bazaar screen, which then can give them the upper hand in multiplayer fights.

The bazaar offers three types of skills, Offensive, Defensive, and Movement. The game allows for quite a bit of specialization into each of these categories, but does make the player focus quite a bit on defense, unless they want to be left open to attack. This is because offensive skills are quite a bit more powerful than defensive.

Welcome to a world filled with angry blood thirsty vampires who's attacks are stronger than their defensive abilities. Welcome to Vampire Wars.

This is a brief introduction to how I scored the game. I try to be fair to all games, but I am not going to let sloppyness get by unnoticed. There are a lot of great features within this game, and quite a bit of things that could be better. I break Vampire Wars down into three categories, just like my other reviews. They are; Gameplay, Graphics, and Multiplayer.

Gameplay 6

While Vampire Wars starts off extremely well, (Cool story line, interactive and interesting...) Gameplay falters as you progress through it. Read more down below.

Graphics 9

The graphics of this game are a great asset of Vampire Wars. This is its strongest segment in this review. If Graphics are important to you, you should read down below.

Multiplayer 7

Multiplayer Gaming in Vampire Wars is a bit above average. But not anything extraordinary. It leaves the player asking for more. Read more about it below.

Total: 7.33

While the game is fun, it just is not as good as some of the other titles out there. Mafia Wars by Zynga, and Bloodlines are better games.

Vampire Wars Score: 6

This game started off amazing. The first part of the game, is a personality quiz where you give your answers to a few questions, put yourself into a few scenarios, and blam! It gives you your vampire type. Then after you choose your type, you are thrown right into the game. The story quickly surrounds the player, forcing them into a plot line of a story! An actual story! This introduces the player to the different aspects of the game, minions, attacking other players, defending, and missions. If the game continued on like this, it would have scored much higher on this review.

Instead, it degenerated into a basic mission style, attack who is on, and get as many minions as possible game. The story, went up into smoke. The missions, while they have experience bars, don't have different levels of experience, like Mafia Wars. Once you master a mission, (IE do it a certain number of times, until the mission mastery bar is full) you gain an experience point, and you are done. No more to it.

Boss fights are the same as Mafia Wars, but without items. This is great, if you like predictability. The fight is a straight up brawl. You attack, then the boss attacks, until you run away or one person is dead. It comes off as unpolished and definitely uninteresting. For someone who wants a bit more excitement in their gameplay however, you will have to look somewhere else.

After you have completed several missions and gone up a few levels, you earn a few experience points. In order to use them, you have to click on experience, (not really at all intuitive, took me a while to find it) and then click each attribute you want to upgrade. For each point, you have to click, and the page refreshes. This would be fine, except that a player has to scroll down, click what they want, be blinded by a white page loading, then is put back into the black screen of the game, and at the top of the page. After a while of this bright barrage, I felt as if I was going to have a seizure. Well not exactly, but it was annoying.

Also, when you upgrade your energy, it sometimes doesn't upgrade the amount of points you have to spend. (If I have two energy left, and I put two experience points into energy, I would have four energy now) In other games, this allows the player to give himself two more energy, do the mission he needs two energy for, and level up. This allowed the player to really leverage the points and keep the game going. Not so in this game. Sometimes it would give me extra points I could use, and other times not. This really discouraged that type of behavior, because I knew I couldn't count on the points being there.

Another annoying feature about this game was the lack of direction the game gave you after it started. It kind of just throws you out to the wolves. After you figure out how to bank your blood, (click on the amount of blood you have), get to where you can buy minions, (under the bazaar tab, then under the minions tab) you realize how unfriendly the entire design is. This definitely detracted from the gameplay. If you click on anything else other than experience, it opens a box where you can use your sponsor points. This is to promote people to use and buy more sponsor points, I guess. (Failed on me)

The last thing I will complain about with this game is when buying minions, (or properties) things that bring in an allotted amount of blood per hour, you have the option of buying 1,5, or 10. A bit annoying since when you buy one, the price goes up. So the game is in essence forcing you to wait to buy at least 5, if you want your money's worth. I have found that it is actually beneficial in other games, that if I can afford 2, and I won't be able to log in again for say a days time, I actually make money rather than waiting. This way the game forces you to either lose out on the blood, or log in. (Kinda makes play Vampire Wars more of something you have to do, rather than something you want to.)

The next section of this review is Graphics, a definite redeemer for this game. Don't give up hope on this game if this section plays a big role in how you rate games, because it is the best aspect this game has.

Vampire Wars Score: 8

Vampire Wars's strong suit is definitely the graphics. While still a text based game, (the graphics are very limited in these types) Vampire Wars offers quite a bit of content in this area. The most impressive feature, is the avatar creator. Much like a three dimensional video game where you would actually move the character around, it allows you to create and customize your own vampire. There are quite a bit of options, and it lets the player see themselves as a vampire, adding to the personality quiz effects. The player can see themselves as a vampire. This is really cool.

Other cool features are detailed minions and powers pictures. These add a creepiness to the game that is very cool. The menus while somewhat confusing are styled very nicely, also adding to the vampire-esque theme.

The only real graphics problem within this game is that it is, a text based game. It relies on the imagination of the player to create the world where the game is played. This game did a great job using that median given its limitations.

Vampire Wars Score: 7 

Vampire Wars is located on the social network Facebook. This makes it a great place for friends to come together to play the game. It does however, lack a way for them to do so fluently. If you and all your friends attacked the same person for whatever reason, you could call that collaboration, but really, it would serve no purpose. Vampire Wars just doesn't allow you to really get together with your friends.

There is a clan page, but once again, not everyone has the same clan, so you often don't see half the conversations. This becomes irritating, because you have to read through lines and lines of meaningless statements to read any messages that may pertain to you. Also, this page is hidden within your clan tab, and takes several clicks to get to it. If Vampire Wars was focusing on multiplayer, this would be one of the first things a user would see when they log in.

Also within the clan tab, is a page specifically designed to let you give your clan members gifts. This is cool, but really kind of unnecessary. Unless they are significantly lower level than you, giving gifts would not be necessary. You do get "gifts" from Vampire Santa, to reward overly generous behavior, but really it only promotes bombarding your friends with the cheapest gifts possible, in order to rank up lots of Santa points. 

This section wasn't a total failure by any means. There were a few features that I did enjoy. Labeling Vampires without any clan members as fresh meat makes for easy pickings. This is great because not only does it encourage them to gain friends, (ie more people playing) it lets you grab the easy blood. Rather than searching the numbers, it labels them with a highlighted green title for easy viewing. I love this.

I also like the idea of having a skill ranking. This allows you to see what level the people you want to attack are operating at with their level of powers. It gives you a good reference point. Combining this with clan size, you can see if you stand a good chance at winning the fight. A great addition to Vampire Wars.

While Vampire Wars offers semi-solid gameplay, great graphics, and decent multiplayer cooperation, it still has a long way to go. I really do hope that Zynga keeps improving it. It definitely needs more work before it appeals to a larger crowd than those who are addicted to anything Vampire. It probably serves the purpose of tapping into that market, but it really has the potential to be so much more.

This concludes the guide's look into the game Vampire Wars. I sincerely hope that this review was informative, and that you enjoyed reading it. If that is the case, then you should check out my author page, gregorymjason.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and please, don't be afraid to comment below. I am trying to make my hubs the best they can be, and any input is great input. Thanks so much.

-Gregorymjason

Facebook, the social network where this game is played can be found here.

Zynga, the makers of the game have their own site, which can be found here.

If you enjoyed this review, then check out my other reviews here.