Summary

I have to admit that I hesitated a good while before buying Bloodlines, because of all of the reviews that mentioned bugs. However, I liked the screenshots and the vampire theme and decided to give it a chance. At least with the patch installed, I really enjoyed the game and found no significant or show-stopping bugs. It looks great, the NPC are very interesting and well developed, and the quests can be funny, dark, and quite elaborate. The game, even with the patch, does have a few technical problems as well as some other flaws. However, if you like vampire stories and role-playing games, then Bloodlines is definitely worth a try.

Sound

There is a lot of good atmosphere in this game, thanks to some good music, great voice acting, and ambient sounds. I am not into heavy metal music, but it just seemed to fit well in this game's gothic scenes. However, even with the patch, there are still some sound issues, especially occasional studdering (increasing my RAM seemed to improve this a bit for me). Also, the game crashed to desktop about 8 times. Replayability/Value: Overall, I am very pleased with this game. The game will last about 40 solid hours the first time through. In my view, there is not much replay value here. While it might be interesting to try another vampire clan or the other gender, there's not much difference in how the story unfolds. There are at least two alternate endings, but the difference is only about twenty seconds of cutscenes. Still, if you like role-playing games, first-person shooters, and vampire stories, then I highly recommend Bloodlines. I hope there's a sequel.

Gameplay

Character creation (you can be 1 of 7 types of vampires) is interesting, allowing you to customize a male or female vampire that has been recently sired. You have several choices of abilities and skills, but character creation is not as deep as in some RPGs like Morrowind. During the game, you earn experience points that you can use to increase certain skills, attributes, or disciplines (your vampiric powers). This system generally works well, but don't expect to max out many of these areas by the end of the game (thus, choose your character-development path wisely). The game is rather linear in progression, although there are a number of side quests and your character is allowed to solve some quests in 2 or 3 different ways. Movement and combat are much like typical first-person shooters, and melee weapons are much more powerful than guns (a good sword will take you through about the whole game--I like the shotgun, though). There are a few good scares in the game (such as a haunted hotel and an encounter at a park), but the developers missed a lot of great opportunities to really scare players. Overall, the story is a very good one, and you'll meet some fascinating characters (like VV, Gary, Jack) who have great dialogue. The quests are well done and often multi-layered, but there are a few areas where things get bogged down, such as when you are trying to reach certain bosses. You often have to go through an hour or two of encounters with their minions in order to reach them. I have only played the game through once as a male Toreador, but I think I did about all of the side quests, in addition to the main quests. There was only one quest in a graveyard that I found too frustrating to complete, but thankfully it was an optional side quest.

Summary

"Deus Ex with Vampires thrown in the mix" Being the third game from what is one of the only decent RPG companies in the US, this was the only RPG on the PC I was looking forward to the entire year, and the only one that I played. So after playing it, all I can say is: Next game, please! It's not that the game is really bad, but it's not good, it had a good idea going (even if said idea had been done before) it's just that it falls flat on its face trying to do it. Troika's game just keep getting worse and worse each time, it seems. Arcanum was a great game but was plagued by horribly graphics, gameplay imbalance and a general sense of lacking. Temple of Elemental Evil improved on its graphics a lot but didn't in just about everything else. And now, we have Vampire, which is basically Deus Ex but take out all the cyberdink and insert bloodsucking. Emphasis on the suck. What sucks about it, anyway? Well, basically everything that Deus Ex got wrong. 1. Small environments that give a limited feeling. 2. Far too ahead of its time. In system requirements! I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro, for crying out loud. How come I'm looking at a slideshow? 3. Bad voice acting. And all of them in the Chinese part of the respective games! 4. Surprisingly linear. For a game from the makers of Fallout, I was expecting far more ability to run the game the way you want it. More on these problems in the respective sessions. All in all, Vampire could have been a great game but it suffers from quite a few problems. The most crippling issue is the slowness of the game even on a rather modern system which can handle Half Life 2 like a breeze. The slowness of the game simply kills the enjoyment and immersion you could get from it. My advice: try picking the game up maybe five years from now and maybe your PC will run it smoothly enough to be enjoyable. But then again... I tried installing Deus Ex just last year just to see how it would run, and it was, unbelievably enough, still slow. I guess the problem's in the bad programming, not the system it's running on.

Sound

Sound was pretty good. The voice acting has lots of gems in it, but suffers from some bad voice acting too. Mostly only in the Chinese part of the game, though. If they can't come up with decent sounding voices that don't play to the "dumb Chinese" stereotype can't they just stop doing Chinese parts in a game? It's so demoralizing. Other than that the rest of the voices were, for the most part, surprisingly good. There were certain characters who were just the right part sinister, stupid, boorish, cunning, sophisticated, you name it. Overall I was impressed, something that doesn't happen too often when it comes to voice acting. Sound effects were okay. I've so gotten used to the stock sounds you hear in every game that I hardly notice them anymore unless they're really bad. What drags the game down in the sound department is the music. Nothing but bad techno goth music, and repetitive pieces at that. It may be though that I just don't like this kind of music. Overall the music left me longing for far more, and I really hated listening to this game's tracks. Still, overall a good sound package. Could have dropped those Chinese parts, and I was wishing for more variety and excitement in the music, but overall, pretty good.

Gameplay

What's wrong with the game? Well the gameplay actually has some good things going for it. Like Deus Ex, you have an RPG system grafted onto a FPS world. What this means is story, character interaction, character growth/management and problem solving using multiple approaches (as per the Fallout tradition) blended with the immersion of a First Person perspective. It almost works, except that, as mentioned earlier, the game is slow as a pig flying over hell. No wait... bah. Framerates are decent in smaller areas with no action going on, however in larger areas, or whenever there are hostile creatures, the framerate slows to a slideshow, making you almost feel that Celerity Level 5 automatically kicks in whenever you get into combat. I thought I was getting a free lunch at first until cheap thugs with baseball bats began knocking my vampire's head off its shoulders with minimal effort, something no mortal should be able to do if you have Celerity on! Worse, the game seems to have a problem feeding it information to your PC, as often your character will clunkily keep moving in one direction, and stay locked that way, ages after you let go of the movement keys. Sometimes, you try pressing the mouse button to fire and your PC Speaker beeps saying it's hanging and cannot process your request. Oh, it does this with the keyboard, too! This usually happens whenever there's a lot of action on screen, leading me to believe the game is feeding far too many instructions to my poor CPU. I guess an upgrade is in order, didn't think I'd need to upgrade to a 4Ghz chip so soon. This is really a shame because the gameplay had a lot going for it. The FPS enemies aren't very varied or smart, but they would have given lots of entertainment in a fight if the game were even half as smooth as it is. The meat of the game: the different ways to get around puzzles using dialogue, stealth, or whatever other means depending on how you grew your character, is excellent. Unfortunately this only holds true for about half the game, the other half is spent on dungeon hacks where you simply are forced to combat, and with the slideshow deficiencies and clunky interface I mentioned above, let me say it was hell. Be wary of spending too many experience points on the non-combat disciplines because you will surely need to fight sooner or later. Another bummer in the game is the totally linear feel of the entire game, which was done that way likely to preserve the painstakingly-scripted events that keep the story flowing correctly. This is not only from the story progression (which you really cannot change to any significant degree) but also in some of the dungeons that force you to go through a specific route so you can see some nifty scripting. I mean, the game had some scary moments, using the established techniques from System Shock 2. But so you can see all the carefully planned scares you are herded like a sheep through a particular path to see all the scary stuff, and then afterwards a cheap door opens so you can just get back to the start via shortcut without passing the long way again. The word "contrived" hardly begins to describe the feeling. I guess game producers still haven't solved the riddle of linearity and non-linearity vs. telling a good story. In many ways, linearity is still necessary to make sure a scene progresses the way they wrote it. But in fairness, the game isn't supposed to be non-linear, Vampire: The Masquerade after all is supposed to be a story-telling game rather than anything else so I guess they were aiming for that story. Too bad though that they included way too many action parts despite the White Wolf World of Darkness philosophy. All in all, gameplay can be summarized like this for the most part: non combat parts, cool. Combat parts, suck. Linearity: gives good progression but in the end scheme of things, suck.

Summary

Since it was first announced, fans of the first Vampire the Masquerade game, Redemption, and players of the table top rpg Vampire the Masquerade have been awaiting the release of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Having played Redemption, I had high hopes for Bloodlines. There were several flaws I found in the first game, and hoped that they would be fixed in the sequel. For the most part, my concerns were answered, but, there were still some things I found wrong about this game. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is set in the Vampire universe. It is a world filled with gothic culture, and political intrigue. For those who aren't familiar with the game, Vampire the Masquerade is not about going out into the night and sucking the blood of victims. Sure, vampires need blood to survive, but there is much, much more depth to all of the stereotypes of the vampire world. It is about taking the role of a vampire, in most cases who has just been embraced, or been made a vampire, and learning the ways of the kindred. You have to learn how to control the beast, uphold the masquerade, interact with other kindred, and live by the rules set forth by your clan. Before you are able to play the game, you first have to generate your character. There are a couple ways that you can do this. The first way, which unexperienced players are encouraged to use, is to answer a series of questions about how you would like to play the game, and the computer selects a clan for you, assigns you your disciplines and stats. After they have generated your character, you are free to make as many changes as you see fit. The other option that you have, is to start from scratch and generate a character on your own, first picking whether you want to be a male or female, then choosing a clan. You are only able to choose clans that belong to the Camarilla, a society of “good vampires”. This is one aspect of the game that I like better that Redemption. In Redemption, you only have the option of being embraced by your Brujah sire. In Bloodlines, you have the option of being a Brujah, a clan comprised mainly of rebels, Gangrel, who pride themselves as being “animal like”, Malkavian, who are, to put it blunt, insane, Nosferatu, who's facial features have been distorted by their embrace, Toreador, the artists of the vampire world, the Tremere (who I chose to play as), they are what you would call the “mages” of the vampire world, and the Ventrue. The Ventrue are the political masterminds of the Camarilla. After you have chosen your clan, you have to assign dots to your stats and traits. There are several ways to make your character. You can make them good at melee fighting, or good with firearms. You can also make them a stealthy computer hacker, or a Rambo like gunner who breaks the door done, shoots first, and asks questions later. Based on what clan you chose, you will have certain disciplines you can pick from. Being a Tremere, I can't think of how many times the Purge spell has saved me in a situation where I am up against a number of enemies. This skill causes all those in a given radius to become deadly ill, and begin to vomit blood. This gives you enough time to gun down several of them at a time. I find Vampire the Masquerade:Bloodlines to be a fitting sequel to Redemption. Although the story may not as good, in fact, not even close to as good as Redemption, the game play is much better. It is also a good example of what Vampire: The Masquerade is all about. It gives an in-depth look to White Wolf's World of Darkness. If you are a fan of first person shooters, you might want to check this out. Although, fans of run and gun shooters like Battlefield 1942 might not appreciate this game as much, because there is a lot more strategy involved than simply running in and shooting everything in site. There is a lot of planning that goes into playing this game, especially in the trial and error aspect of the game. Thank God for the save game feature is all I have to say about that.

Sound

The sound is one aspect of the game that I absolutely love. The music is completely fitting during the different levels, especially the little piano songs you here while in the ocean house. The sound just adds so much atmosphere to the game. One complaint about the music comes when you are inside of clubs. At first, they seem really cool, but they repeat over and over, and eventually, they get very, very old.

Gameplay

After you have chosen your clan, you have to assign dots to your stats and traits. There are several ways to make your character. You can make them good at melee fighting, or good with firearms. You can also make them a stealthy computer hacker, or a Rambo like gunner who breaks the door done, shoots first, and asks questions later. Based on what clan you chose, you will have certain disciplines you can pick from. Being a Tremere, I can't think of how many times the Purge spell has saved me in a situation where I am up against a number of enemies. This skill causes all those in a given radius to become deadly ill, and begin to vomit blood. This gives you enough time to gun down several of them at a time. After you have created your character, the game finally begins. The game starts in a bedroom, where you hear the sounds of a woman embracing you. In vampire law, it is illegal for one vampire to embrace a human without approval of the prince of the city, which is the situation you are faced with. After the embrace, the scene switches to what appears to be some sort of auditorium. There is a man in a suite talking to a group of vampires about you and your sire. You are both tied up, and things aren't looking very good. The first decision they make is to execute your sire. Prince La Croix is trying to decide what to do with you, when another vampire speaks up and stands up for you. The prince decides to let you live, and gives you orders to go to Santa Monica. Before you are able to leave, you are ambushed by what is believed to be a Sabbat raid. The Sabbat are the “evil” sect of vampires. They do not follow the masquerade, and make every effort to expose who they are. To make a long story short, you meet up with a Brujah named Jack who helps you out of the situation, and shows you the ropes. The tutorial is optional, but by doing it, you get two experience points and a free set of lock picks. The story has several comical elements to it, especially when you deal with Malkavians. I won't spoil the fun as to who it is, but believe me, it's sure entertaining to watch that aspect of the story unfold. Some of the characters you encounter along the way are very memorable. You come in contact with a seductive school girl vampire, a rebellious Brujah named Jack, and an Ed Gein wannabe, just to name a few. Another fun moment in the game is when your in a club and you have the option to dance. To say the least, it's funny. Also, some of the conversations are down right hillarious. The game itself plays fairly smooth. There are a few ways you can play the game. You can go through all of the missions, and shoot everyone that you have to get rid of, you can sneak around and avoid killing to achieve your objectives, or you could try to talk your way out of various conflicts that you encounter. Although these different options exist, they aren't done to the extent that they could have been. You are pretty much encouraged to shoot every enemy that you encounter. In fact, it is a big mistake if you don't invest a good amount of experience in firearms, as later on in the game, melee weapons don't cut it. Which brings me to one flaw I found early on in the game. Firearms don't do as much damage as you would think they would. I've found myself in situations where I am up against three or four men, all armed with guns, and I shoot them in the head, and they don't die. It takes two sometimes three head shots to kill your enemy, which when your up against a lot of enemies, can really be a drag. I've even shot someone in the head with a shotgun and had them stay alive. The first person shooter/role playing game aspect of the game is very appealing to some players, but others don't like it as much. Personally, I enjoy being able to switch from third to first person view. When you are wielding a firearm it's best to stay in first person, however, you are forced to be in third person when using a melee weapon. Chances are, if you like the way Morrowind or Deus Ex: Invisible War plays, you will like this game. One thing I've noticed, is that the game players a lot like Deus Ex: Invisible War, another one of my favorite computer games. You have multiple ways you can complete your missions. Another big similarity, one that myself and several others players are faced with, is not having enough money to buy ammunition. Not that I find it a flaw in the game, it just takes a bit of getting used to. One problem I found in the game, which seemed to come across at a critical point, was that you cannot hide in dumpsters. I had accidentally fired my gun after saving my game, which attracted the attention of the police. I was running and saw a dumpster in an alley, ran and tried to jump in, but instead I ended up standing on top of it. One thing that struck me as interesting about this game, are the moments of horror you experience while playing

Summary

I should preface this review by coming right out and saying that I normally hate the urban vampire setting. I find it incredibly cliched and the whole goth culture is a bad joke. But a game like Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is more than good enough for me to ignore my prejudices and appreciate the game for what it is. First-person RPGs are hard to come by, and good ones are fewer still. So when a game in this genre comes out I don't much care what the setting is, I just want it to be fun. And Bloodlines is fun. As easily the most anticipated RPG of 2004, it has a lot of hype to live up to, and as a developer with a reputation for making great RPGs with real depth Troika has a lot of demanding fans to please. The result is mostly good news: like other Troika games, Bloodlines has a deep and engrossing storyline, and richly detailed world, an excellent script and conversation component, and a highly versatile character customization system. Unfortunately, like other Troika games, Bloodlines can't shake the feeling that it could have used a bit more time in the oven, and this is very surprising given the game's release timetable. Publisher Activision was under contract not to release Bloodlines before Half-Life 2, and after that game's extended delays Activision was so eager to finally get Bloodlines out the door that it ended up being released on the very same day as its bigger brother. Yet despite all this added time, the game still has a shopping list of minor annoyances. None are show-stoppers, and the game itself is stable (I've never experienced a crash), but there are character animation glitches, typos in the game's text, sporadic interface glitches, some graphical mishaps with lights shining through walls, and the incredibly common and irritating phenomenon of a single NPC blocking an entire alley by just standing in the middle, so that the only recourse is to kill him. Furthermore the game's graphics and sound are both mixed bags; some aspects are great, while others are terrible. But this is focusing on the negative. If you can ignore the bugs (at least until a patch arrives), you'll find very few faults in Bloodlines' core gameplay. This game takes a myriad of components and assembles them into a single, cohesive package, one that you'll heartily wish other developers would copy. Bloodlines diverges from the traditional RPG in the sense that you never really "level up". Rather there are nearly two dozens separate traits and skills that can be upgraded independently as the game progresses. When you complete quests you will be awarded character points which you can then spend on upgrading your traits and skills. In fact completing quests (or secondary goals involved with quests) is the only way to gain character points, there is absolutely no experience benefit to killing, which makes Bloodlines differ greatly from any hack-and-slash RPG. The game is divided into dozens of different locales, with four primary "hub" maps representing different areas of the city. Each of these city maps are pretty big, and better yet they're packed with people and locations to visit. Unfortunately entering any building means loading a new map, even if the building is very small, but this is forgivable especially since the loading times aren't too long. There is simply plenty to see and do in each of the game's hub sections; I think I spent at least 15 hours at the first city section (Santa Monica) and its accompanying quest areas even before I moved on to the next hub. At the start of the game you won't be able to travel around to other areas, but you can freely travel between hubs once you've "unlocked" them by progressing through the storyline. Outside the city hub areas and their accompanying indoor sections, the game has other locations you'll visit as part of quests. The quality of these range from poor to exceptional, with the best of them being among the greatest first-person levels ever developed. I don't want to spoil any part of the plot, but the haunted mansion sequence is the single most atmospheric and spooky gaming experience I can ever remember, and it is more than good enough to make up for other quest areas that are not as good. It's a pity that such a great and detailed RPG has to be marred by bugs and an overall lack of polish. The guys at Troika have a history of releasing poorly tested games that require one or more significant patches. This cannot go on forever. When brand new development studios like Crytek can build a state-of-the-art graphics engine from the ground up and release a stable and playable game with it, it gives the seasoned developers at Troika no excuse. I heartily recommend buying this game, but buy it like you would buy any other Troika game: wait two months. In two months it'll be patched, and in two months it'll be cheap.

Sound

One of Bloodlines' biggest strengths is its conversation system. Quite simply the dialogue is better written and offers more options than any other RPG with the possible exception of Planescape: Torment. But in Bloodlines, it's all spoken, and the voice acting is always good. Conversations are witty and memorable, with the same humour seen in the Fallout games. For example, when asked if you've ever done anything *really* evil lately, you can admit to recently blowing up part of the city, you can confess to drinking human blood, or you can say you once voted Republican. And you will never get tired of the endless supply hilarious pick-up lines you can use on girls in the game's several bars (and their subsequent creative ways of rejecting you--who'd have thought goth chicks would be so picky??). In addition to this wealth of voice acting, the game's music is moody and appropriate--I was about to say it's "good", but this is techno-goth-grunge we're talking about, so the best you can say is that it fits the setting. And it should be noted that some quest areas have spectacular atmospheric noises (like the haunted mansion mentioned earlier). But on the downside some of the weapons effects are bland, and your own player's footsteps have the immensely annoying habit of carrying on for half a second after you've stopped walking. This wouldn't be so bad if they were subtle, but they're not; frequently the loudest sound you'll hear as you move around the city are you own footfalls, and half the time it sounds like you're walking across styrofoam. That just doesn't seem realistic to me. But the negatives are not enough to serious hurt the game's excellent voice cast and atmospheric effects. Overall the sound scheme is better than average.

Gameplay

Bloodlines' gameplay is best described as Fallout-style quests and character interaction in a Deus Ex-style first-person setting. Most of the time you'll have more than one way to complete a quest, and while combat will at times be inevitable it is not something you will seek out because it simply carries no reward. The game's combat model is good, but not spectacular. It obviously heavily favours melee fighting, as firearms are only useful at long range, and only after you've significantly upgraded your firearms skill. Personally if I were walking into a room with five bad guys I'd rather have a gun than a crowbar, but that's not how this game works. The good news is that the melee controls, while not as good as a 3D fighting game, are a whole lot better than some recent RPGs like Morrowind or the Gothic series. But Bloodlines' best trait in the gameplay department is undoubtedly the character customization process. There are games that give you more options for customizing your character, but none have such as many characteristics that have a tangible effect on the gameplay itself. This is more than just choosing a melee vs ranged vs magic character, as too many other RPGs fall back on. The choices you make in character customization will dramatically alter the game's conversations, quests, and relationships. By far the most important choice comes when selecting your clan. There are seven, and they range from the cultured, sophisticated and intelligent Toreador to the hideous, deformed Nosferatu to the insane, schizophrenic Malkavian. Your choice of clan will determine where you can spend your initial character points, and which traits will be more expensive to upgrade as the game progresses. I know that I want to go back and replay the game as a Malkavian, as every single conversation is different. For starters I chose to belong to the Gangrel clan--strong, feral, and highly skilled, but prone to loosing control to their animalistic nature. The Gangrel begin with points to spend in the physical traits (strength, dexterity, etc) and fighting skills, but few or no points in the social abilities or mental attributes. This does not mean he's a stupid character, because I have since upgraded my research, computer, and lockpicking skills quite a bit. But he is a bit of an animal--the Gangrel have a unique Vampiric Discipline ("magic spell", if you want to consider it like that) that gives them various animalistic traits for a limited time. At first it was just cat-like night vision, but as I grew more powerful it gave me claws, faster movement, and a low ground-hugging swagger. The downside to my Gangrel character is that he's more prone to something called Frenzy. All vampires have to battle it, that being the Beast within them. Every vampire has a "Humanity" trait that rises or lowers based on your actions within the game. If you routinely kill innocent people your Humanity meter will fall. If your character has a low humanity level, and especially if he's hungry for blood, he may lapse into an animalistic rampage, at which point you might as well let go of the keyboard and watch the action. A Frenzied vampire is incredibly strong and bloodthirsty, and can inflict massive amounts of carnage, but is completely out of control. And in the game's city areas, this is bad. It is vitally important for the safety of the vampiric way of life that they remain hidden from humanity at large. This is what the Masquerade is about. If you perform a vampiric act--like sucking someone's blood--in public in one of the game's large city sections, it will be considered a Masquerade violation. Think of these violations as demerit points--after the fifth one, the game is over, you lose. But should you make a mistake and commit a Masquerade violation all is not lost, as there are quests to perform that will reduce your Masquerade violation count. Despite some poorly designed quest areas, I have to give Bloodlines full marks in the gameplay department. The world is so detailed and immersive that it succeeds brilliantly in sucking you in (pun intended). That's the acid test for an RPG; despite its flaws, can it immerse you in another world? Bloodlines can.