Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

The Good
Vampire Bloodlines is, without a doubt, a huge improvement over its predecessor. Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption was perhaps more polished to some degree, but it had its share of awful bugs and game design decisions, and a less satisfying story. Vampire Bloodlines turns the game into an FPS RPG, and for the most part, this is a good move. It retains the dark and gritty feel of the first game, and puts it to good use, creating a garish, sin-filled version of Los Angeles.

I am normally amused and disappointed by games that are formulaically “mature.” The use of the word mature often means three things: cursing, lots of violence, and overt sexuality. Bloodlines has these in spades, buts it’s a testament to the game’s good writing and plot that these elements were only a minor deterrent. Most characters have interesting stories and dialogue to impart, and the Source engine brings their faces to life, as does some surprisingly good voice acting. Just brace yourself for some very vulgar and sexually explicit dialogue. This is supposed to be an L.A. filled with vice-ridden, hedonistic, super-violent immortals, after all.

In the world of Bloodlines, there are 7 clans of vampires. You can play any of them, and all have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some, like the Nosferatu are hideously deformed near-animals. They may be powerful, quiet and deadly stalkers, but they can’t blend in with humans. The Toreador, on the other hand, are powerful, suave aristocrats. They can’t feed on “impure” (re: rats, poor humans, “low blood”) victims, but they have political clout and old-money class.

Regardless of what class you pick, you’ll be able to level up your combat, magic (various “blood” spells) and more intellectual skills. These affect the gameworld noticeably. Try picking a lock, sneaking past a guard, or firing a shotgun at first level, and then do it again when you’ve spent 3 or 4 points on the skill. You will notice a huge difference. Bloodlines is an RPG to its core. Don’t make the mistake of letting its FPS perspective fool you. This is the natural evolution of its third-person predecessor, stat points, imaginary dice-rolls and all.

Bloodlines offers some surprisingly scary and well-designed levels. When you aren’t wandering around Hollywood or Santa Monica, looking for quests and blood, you’ll be sent on individual missions, which take place in separate levels. Some levels, like the abandoned (and possibly haunted?) hotel, the insane asylum, and a graveyard practically drip with fear and tension. One quest that has you investigating a series of increasingly sadistic snuff films is one of the scariest encounters I’ve ever had in a video game.

The combat is fun, if a bit awkward, and all of your abilities are useful, in one way or another. The persuasion and intimidation options are fun, but the best conversation technique of all is saved for one particular clan of vampires. The Malkavians are all half insane, and thus your responses to conversations are all in bizarre Cheshire cat speech. Even better, you can use some blood to make other people just a little crazy, winning them over to your point of view.

The game allows you to really customize your world, with different apartments to move into, different clothes and armor, and different ways of completing almost every mission. You’ll realize that you can complete each mission a number of different ways: sneaking, fighting, magic, charming, intimidating, and ultimately a combination of several of these. This free-form gameplay reminded me a lot of Deus Ex, but in a much more interesting world, to be honest. That is actually on of the highest complements I can give this game, actually. It is the spiritual successor (in gameplay if not in style or construction) of one of my favorite FPS RPGs of all time.

The Bad
Sadly, Bloodlines is absolutely chock-full of mistakes. The animations are for the most part awkward and badly implemented. Likewise, the interface for combat is clunky and hard to use. The Source game engine, used so masterfully by Valve, looks close to ugly here. While the graphics may muster up some truly frightening set pieces, they can also break you out of the game entirely, textures popping in and out and people sticking their arms through walls.

There is evidence of missing or cut quests all over the place: pointless items, broken dialogue, etc. It’s obvious that Troika had some grand plans for this game, and couldn’t or didn’t have the time to implement them. Some of the weapons are overpowered, and some of the classes aren’t balanced properly. The game takes forever to load in many cases, despite being run on a computer that easily destroys its recommended requirements. Finally, the game is incredibly unstable, glitching and crashing frequently.

The Bottom Line
Despite that seemingly insurmountable list of problems, I would still recommend this game to fans of RPGs, FPS RPGs, and White Wolf’s Masquerade universe. This game is one of the deepest and most interesting RPGs I have ever played. It actually puts its gritty urban setting to use (unlike so many games), crafting a bizarre nightmare version of our own dangerous cities. It provides a truly interesting story, great character development, and a terrifically tense and atmospheric experience. However, the number of bugs, glitches and imbalances in the game threaten to ruin it.

The only way to get this great game to be even barely playable is to download the latest fan-made patch, unfortunately. The community patch provides all of the fixes that Troika should have put into the game before it went gold. Modern resolutions are added to the game’s options (this makes a huge difference), broken quests are fixed, missing quests are added, powers and weapons that got cut are added in, character creation is fleshed out, and most importantly, the game is stabilized.

So, if you want a deep, scary and engrossing RPG, get Vampire Bloodlines. You’ll have to a masochist or an extremely odd brand of gamer to appreciate it though, even with the patches.

The Good
Atmosphere, storyline, gameplay, immersion. WOW!!!

-I have a 1,4 GHZ with 512+128 mb ram and a Geforce card of 64 mb.
Worked fluently and was terribly beautiful!

• the finishing of mode (creeping up behind someone to deliver an annihilating blow)

-the inventory description for the fireaxe item which goes along the lines of:

"A fireaxe, truely a tool of a madman. Who else would fight fire with a blade?"

The Bad
Some bugs, crashing to desktop, some other minor glitches. Do not think though this game is severely bugged. Not true.

Long loading times.Though they are worth it considering the environments it creates.

The Bottom Line
Slightly buggy, Graphics are absurdly slick for low requirements.
An RPG fan WILL at least 'like' this.
Fantastic immersion.
One of the better RPG's/ shooter/ whatnot.
100% worth its money (especially now it's bargain bin material)

The Good
Note: 2nd update. Maybe a game I've played more than a week needs a little better review than just 100% trashing it cough

The sacrifices I made just to fulfill the tech requirements of this game (sigh). Anyway...

Oooh, another Vampire: The Masquerade game...boy have I been waiting a long time for this one. Got quite upset with the previous version due to bugs and hardware conflicts, hoping this one would make it up...

Wow, nice graphics...very nice...takes forever to load, but very nice. Oooh, it's an RPG too, from screenshots I dreaded it was just an adventure game, thankfully for RPG diehards like myself it had the very unique "clan" character creation. Too bad I never played the actual board game.

Graphics
Yeah, baby. Graphics were to my opinion, "ahead of its time" or at least very much appeasing. I must again note the great use of color in this game. I hate horror games with gloomy colors...this isn't one of them. Although still in dark blend atmosphere, Bloodlines has no problem in using bright colors to brighten up the mood...especially the color red.

Story
Though I didn't play the game long enough to actually experience all the story (due to technical conflicts)... I do recall the "sick and twisted" plot of the "underground" of urban cities. Especially at downtown Hollywood I thinks. Most of the missions are essentially one cult or horror movie after another. The effort put in the story is extremely well received at my end anyway.

Music
I must admit, I've never been exposed to Gothic music before. And after playing this game, I was hooked with one of the music tracks you can hear at a local club. Probably also the only RPG in existence where your hero can dance...and really good too! (Final Fantasy X-2, for a dancing-mood-plot game you should be ashamed!) Even the NPC (Non-player-characters) can dance equally as good. I literally, usually just let my hero dance at the club and watch for minutes and minutes...(sad to think that he can dance better than me...oh well)

Combat
Combat was pretty much straight forward. The controlling system was alright, not the best that I've experienced for these types of games (the best is still Fable), but still enjoyable...though shooting was somewhat tricky.

I do remember something else very well (excuse the ladies). This is the first game I know that has woman's breasts bouncing up and down (again, 'scuse the ladies). At the beach there's this Maldovian? vampire, during the dialog I couldn't take my eyes of those things going boing, boing, boing. Egad, I thought I was old and experienced enough to get past these stupid teenage ideas. But nooo, the only dialogs I got from her was boing, boing, boing. Some wrong with my brain man, something seriously wrong....:p

The Bad
Sigh. I don't think I've ever personally badmouthed a whole developer group. But Troika really has gone to far. I'm still pissed about the truck load of bugs they did with Arcanum...and that was still AFTER I downloaded 2 freakin patches.

But before I get ahead of myself, I was seriously disappointed with the previous Vampire the Masquerade game, since the game went way slow and buggy in several scenes. I thought they would gain wisdom from past mistakes....only to find out they also developed Temple of Elemental Evil, which by the way, the demo was better than the game.

Sorry, back to the main issue. Loading game....still loading game...egad it's still loading? Don't remember the last time a game took this long to load? Oh, wait, there NEVER WAS a game that took this long to load. What the hell are they doing with the programming, trying to get a World Record on pissing gamers by long loading hours? Considering installing the game was long enough....sheeesh.

The one major thing that totally wrecked my gaming experience was, guess what? Loading....(again). Can you imagine that E V E R Y single time you go to a different room it takes nearly 5 yes 5 minutes to load. You go to a small store just to see the inventory and it takes 5 minutues to load. I got the minimum spec requirements, probably not the recommended, but hey, does anyone really HAVE to upgrade their PC everytime some idiot developer thinks they should be innovative with the latest tech equipment. The developers of DOOM had the decency of warning players. I think I've wasted more time waiting for the dang game to load than actually playing the dang game.

And there's this final bug that was quite amusing. Everytime I went to the beach (yes, the vampire girl...I'm hooked), suddenly the game gets into "slow motion". The graphics turn in "matrix coding" and you move 1 frame every several minutes. Probably because the dang game hasn't finished L O A D I N G the last time and was still trying to make up for it during gameplay...

The Bottom Line
I don't know about you but none of the people I knew actually finished the game due to several bug or technical related issues that seriously lead to major anger issues.

Another possibly great game ruined by Troika. Way to go fella's! Won't be playing any future games from you guys!

To think, some of these dudes actually were from the Fallout team....sigh.

(Oooh, Troika recently shutdown! Hope it was because of my review! Hah!)