You know how it goes: You’re up late, feeling a little peckish, and you don’t have anything in the fridge. What do you do?

I mean, I’d go to the store down the street and get some sour bears. And if you’re Draku, the star of Midnight Bite, you do the same thing. Except substitute “store down the street” with “village at the base of the mountain,” and substitute “sour bears” with “blood of the sleeping townsfolk.”

But he’s a little guy, and the humans are prejudiced against vampire children who stalk up in the night and murder them, so he has to be careful. And as the one controlling him, you also have to be careful because the controls are apparently also racist against the undead.

It’s the standard stealth exercise: Sneak past guards, hide in containers, avoid flashlight beams like they are the burning rays of the morning sun. You only have to feed on all the sleeping victims to proceed, but the game also evaluates your performance based on how well you avoid detection and whether or not you collect all the coins scattered around the level.

And all that’s good, but the controls take a lot of getting used to. It’s a virtual-joystick setup, kinda, only the “joystick” is the entire screen. It’s a little hard to describe and understand, but you more or less drag Draku around the screen, and it’s fickle. I had times that I wanted him to go right to get past a guard before he swung back around, and he just turned around instead.

The controls take a lot of getting used to.

Eventually, I could get the little sucker going where I wanted him to most of the time, but there were still times that I failed because the game had a different opinion on what I wanted to do than I did. And it’s too bad because this is an otherwise cute and fun game.

It’s hard to be a vampire in this political climate. It really is.

Game Name: : Midnight Bite The Good: Cute, fun stealth gameplay with extra layers of challenge for teh hardcorez. The Bad: Clunky controls, and the tutorials often tell you things after you needed to know them. The Verdict: It’s an otherwise quality game, but the weird controls hold it way back until you learn to work with them. Buy from: App Store – Midnight Bite – Milkstone Studios

[rating=game3]