The Dracula Files represents two of the biggest phenomenons in entertainment at the moment, vampires and casual gaming, while throwing in a love of ‘modernizing’ classic tales.  

The best way to describe The Dracula Files is, you get what you paid for. It’s an easily playable game with a variety of locations played out over 30 levels and a ton of varying mini-games that range from the simple to the rage quit inducing, fiendishly difficult. Then again the game allows you to skip the mini-games if you so choose at no penalty to the experience, effectively they are there for no reason. The reason for this is the objects hidden in every level are the true goal. The placement and relative size of these objects can be frustrating at times, but at least the HUD is not overly cluttered so the screen is relatively free of anything that could potentially block your view of an object and players can access unlimited hints during the game.  

You also get a modern version of the classic vampire tale. Dracula is back after 100 years and it is now up to the descendants of Van Helsing and Harker to defeat him. Not only does the story feature the Count it also features werewolves, lesser vampires and ghosts as they seek to find cursed relics and holy items. Once again there is certainly some variety to the Dracula Files.  

Performance wise it’s limited by its status as a casual game. The character designs are cartoonish, almost reminiscent of a Scooby-Doo cartoon which doesn’t really seem like the right choice for the content of the game. A story about Dracula, the original vampire, is always going to be quite serious and scary but there wasn’t much of a focus on that in the game’s character design. The backgrounds at least looked a little more serious but occasionally were plagued by a lack of a sense of depth in the image and you did get an overriding sense that the characters and backgrounds were from two separate games. Occasionally the lighting of the backgrounds attributed to the difficulty of finding the objects. The sound effects and music was one thing that did help to build some atmosphere in the game given it the sense of the Gothic that it deserves.  

Overall the Dracula Files is a game that you can pick up and play for a few minutes or a few hours depending on the mood you’re in. The swing in difficulty between one mini-game to another is frustrating and the lack of a penalty for not completing them is odd. Its design seems at odds with itself at times, but the audio and sound effects are well done and a bonus Mahjong game does sweeten the deal.