Night Gate

Review

The Evil Vampire Lord Grendel is about to unleash a horde of 10,000 vampires on the last human settlement. As you are one of the last vampire hunters, you must find the two seals that open the gate of Grendel’s lair and kill him before he despatches his horde onto the small groups of survivors to which you belong. There is no time to waste; you are the last hope to save humanity in Night Gate.

Night Gate is a third-person shooter action game developed and self-published by DangerousBob Studio LLC on the 19^th of May, 2023, on the Steam platform.

In Night Gate, you play Robin, one of the last vampire hunters, and you’ll start your journey at your headquarters, which is located on a small island named Daisy Town, in the middle of the large swamp. There are four other locations to visit in the game, and they can be easily found by opening the world map. These places are basically to the North, South, East and West of Daisy Town. To reach these places, you need to use an airboat to access them. Each of these locations, including Daisy Town, will have a direction post. By reading these posts on each site, you’ll unlock the fast travel to come from or to go to these places, and therefore, you will no longer need to use the airboat when unlocked.

The game is based on completing objectives, which are to find two seals, the Silver Viper and the Gold Finx, located in two of the four locations. You’ll need to complete two rather small dungeons to acquire these seals. Yes, you do have a few other dungeons, but they’re nothing special, and for one of them you’ll need a specific level of experience to be able to explore it. You also have three bounties pick up and a couple of treasures to find. There are a few mini-games: playing cards, fishing, killing giant bats that are trying to take away your pigs, and reeling in vampires with a hook.

The game is played on a daily cycle (day and night), and therefore you have two different types of environments. During the day, well, you won’t see any vampires, and to be blunt, the atmosphere is very dull in two of the five areas. The trees look the same, and you’ll see a few animals here and there. You can only go back to Daisy Town during the daytime as it will be firmly closed at night. The Trainyard area is quite fun to discover and of course, the Badlands is fun too, as it is Lord Grendel’s lair and is a little harder than the rest. There is a little puzzle element in the game, which is good.  In fact, the game would have been greatly elevated had there been more puzzles.

There is a good gamepedia and tutorial on how to shoot different types of vampires, but there are some major issues with the controls, sound effects and some of the weapon’s aiming systems. It is quite fluid regarding the movements with the mouse and the keyboard, with the exception of the jump. I simply didn’t like the jump as I kept missing platforms, especially at Grendel’s lair where there are two sets of four grinding gears in the middle of your pathway, and you have to reach the other side and light a tall fire lantern. To make the situation even harder, the left-hand set of gears is moving forward while the right-hand set is moving backward, and you have to jump onto them to reach the other side. This is the place I decided to quit as I found the jump system too inadequate.

The sound of some of the weapons is inaccurate, especially the first handgun, which sounds like an air pistol; not great. And I must mention that the voice-overs are not very good either. But the most frustrating aspect for me was the map. You can display the map on your screen, so you know where you’re going, but every time the game loads for reasons such as mounting or unmounting a horse, loading a new part of an area or going down bunker to sleep or save, you will lose the map on your screen. As loading is frequent in this game, I had to click three times on the map button to get it back. What a nuisance!

Some of the graphics are decent but need some polishing. As mentioned above, two of the five areas are quite decent.  You might perish a few times depending on the difficulty level you choose at the time you launch the game.

If you are interested in facing the horde without playing the Solo campaign, you can do so with the Horde mode. It’s all about how long you can survive the onslaught, and that’s it.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com   

Night Gate Steam Store Page