Highs and lows.
User Rating: 7.1 | Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines PC
I really liked Troika's other game temple of elemental evil, but again just like vampires it was buggy beyond belief and practically unfinishable for myself for quite a while till patches were released. The lows. I bought vampires with the intention of doing as little actual combat as possible and as much text based adventuring as I could, and it would be wise to do so. You can tell this is there first foray into action style and I really wish they would stick to the turn based ToEE approach. The whole affair of combat is just clunky and poorly executed, if this didn't have any RPing elements it would be a flop. Simple things like trying to attack someone with melee style on stairs will have you wildly swinging over their heads. The physics in this game is absurd as well, like everyone is made of flubber and bounce amusingly when hit. Mix in the dodgy AI, clipping issues and strange AI combat behaviours and it is quite off putting. Another annoying point is the lack of character models in the game, not only are you given generic looking characters to choose from which is almost RP suicide from the start. But it isn't uncommon to walk into a club and see 3 or 4 indentical people, same hair, same clothes. Every homeless bum will look the same as will basically all the working girls. On the subject of graphics you'll find numerous clipping issues, as well as the fact the objects seem to have really large invisible unpassable barriers around them. One time a wandering NPC got stuck in a large doorway and even though there was room to pass him I couldn't because of this strange invisible barriers. The biggest issue is that for a fair number of people who've made forum posts is the game plays terribly slow and jerky like. I far exceed minimum specs. for this game but even on the lowest of graphical settings it will constatly be pausing for a few seconds to load whevner you are trying to walk anywhere. Making gameplay and load times excessively annoying. The high The only thing that saves this is the story, great acting voices, interesting characters and a good plot with some decent puzzle solving. I can only recommend this game to RP types like me who really have no interest in this as an action game, I'd recommend waiting for the bargin bin. Deep down yes it is a good, mature themed rpg, but the poor combat and bugs and load problems severely detract from it 
