Publisher: SMERC
Developer: SMERC
Minimum requirements: Internet connection and Facebook account
Genre: Multiplayer Mystery
Release date: Available now

The “Twilight” saga and “True Blood” have helped make vampires the latest fad in chic multimedia. As a result, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that many game developers think a natural progression would be to introduce the bloodsuckers into the world of modern gaming. Enter Fangs, an online experience directly linked to the popular social-networking site Facebook.

Fangs is a multiplayer game set up like a murder mystery party. A minimum of three players is needed to get Fangs off the ground. Once a group is assembled and the game is started, everyone is assigned a role to play. The players are divided into vampires and students. The object of the vampires is to kill enough of the student population to become the majority, while the students try to rid the group of all the vamps.

The way the “killings” occur is through simple voting. Every “day” the students try to guess who among them is a bloodsucker. Through chatting, students try to work together to vote off those whom they believe are the evil ones. Whoever receives the most votes dies, and then it is revealed whether or not an innocent was killed. If a vampire survives, at night it can try to pick off a student, and as this cycle continues, slowly the number of players dwindles. Students also have a few tricks up their sleeves, such has having the ability to use garlic, which gives them immunity for a night. Students also are randomly assigned specific roles, such as “The Nurse,” who can save fellow players from vampire attacks.

Fangs definitely is tapping into a hot topic right now. There’s a fun aspect to the game in that it emphasizes communication, trash-talking and lying to deceive your opponents. But Fangs ultimately suffers from an over-reliance on randomization to keep the game interesting. There’s never any actual way to identify the vampires or the students; it’s all complete guesswork round after round, with no real deduction or strategy. Also, the game’s instructions are never very clear, which creates frustration. Finally, the idea of the game is that, through messaging (both public and private), people will form coalitions. This never really works because there’s never any reason to believe anything anyone says. The result is that the game is just too random to make it very much fun.

There’s potential in Fangs, to be sure. But murder mysteries are only fun when they involve clues and some logic and strategy. If developer SMERC can find a way to make Fangs less about guessing, they’ll have something really fun, but right now it’s just confusing and boring.

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