The Vampire's Assistant: Cirque du Freak review

Andrew Williams

We review The Vampire's Assistant: Cirque du Freak, a mobile game of the movie that needs a bit more bite

Published on Nov 3, 2009

If you’re a fan of Twilight, the marketing men behind the film of The Vampire’s Assistant: Cirque du Freak would like you to think you’ll like their movie too. If the film critics have anything to say on the matter, you probably won’t, but that’s not the point. That said, the movie is based on a fairly well thought-of book series by Darren Shan.

The Vampire’s Assistant mobile game takes the basic premise of the series – that you’re a boy-turned-vampire - and grafts it onto a side-scrolling action platformer infused with a handful of puzzles.

In each of the ten levels, you have to collect an item for a character further up the vampire hierarchy. This will generally involve leaping around an environment filled with platforms, switching a few levers and busting through some floorboards by dropping boxes onto them.

The more action-oriented side of the game is supplied by the enemies skulking around some of these platforms, and that your life slowly seeps away as you play – because you’re a vampire in need of a fix, innit.

Your blood fix isn’t supplied by munching on the necks of the innocent, though. Instead you just have to pick up red orbs strewn throughout each of the levels. There are blue orbs too, which recharge your shield – activated by pressing the 0 key.

The problem with The Vampire’s Assistant: Cirque du Freak is that neither side of its gameplay, the action or puzzle halves, works particularly. Combat is clunky and dull, amounting to hoping your enemies don’t hit you before they hit you, which boils down more to luck than timing.

The puzzles are very repetitive too, featuring the same to’ing and fro’ing between characters that are only equipped with the most prosaic dialogue. In short, there’s just nothing that interesting about the game – it could quite easily be a quick re-skin of another generic platformer for all the character it’s got.

We’d still be happy to recommend it for a quick inoffensive play through, but it’s brought down another rung by the fact that controlling your character feels uncomfortably clumsy. For a vampire, he just doesn’t seem all that nimble thanks to the unresponsive controls.

There are certainly worse games out there than The Vampire’s Assistant: Cirque du Freak, but when a game is this remarkable, we can suggest a good few better ways to spend your time.