A great game that could've been a fantastic game, if only they got rid of the bugs
User Rating: 8.1 | Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines PC
Should i break his neck? Drink his blood? Seduce him and con him to leave my friend alone? Or persuade him to leave my friend along and pay me for all my troubles? These are dilemmas you'll often face through out the course of Vampire: Bloodlines, a First-Person Role-Playing game from Troika Games. In Vampire: Bloodlines you take on the role of a newly created vampire whose thrust into the World of Darkness and forced to survive. After your "sire" (the vampire who created you) is slain for not asking permission to make you a vampire, the Prince Sebastian LaCroix, head honcho of the undead society known as the Camarilla, allows you to live on one condition. That you do his bidding. So you're literally pushed out the door and forced to fend for yourself in order to prove your worth to the Prince and the World of Darkness. You start off being able to choose between several different classes of Vampires. Ranging from the Gangrel, feral loners who can conjur up the powers of the wilderness (ranging from ghost wolves to evil ravens) to the Toreador, seductive beings reliant on smooth-talking and seduction, rather then brute force, to get them through a dangerous situation. Which class you choose will decide how you play through the game. For example if you choose the class of Nosferatu, beings that have been hideously transformed by the curse of vampirism, then you will spend the majority of the game avoiding civilians and crawling through various sewers in order to reach your destanation. After all, looking like a monster isn't going to go down to well with regular people. However certain classes have certain benefits. As i mentioned the Nosferatu spend their time avoiding the living, they are gifted with a spell to turn invisible for a period of time. Each class is given between 4-6 spells, 3 of which are class-specific. Each one of these spells uses up a certain of Blood which is used as the equivalent of mana in this game. To regain blood...well you're a vampire, so if you cant figure that out i'd be surprised that you managed to install the game and get this fair. Anywho. its not long before you off infiltraiting blood-banks and seducing the living. Infact one of the most memorable moments in the game is quite early on when you are told to investigate a haunted mansion, and retrieve a locket from the master bedroom so that the spirits haunting the mansion can be exorcised. This level in the game can truly be nerve-racking the first time (and even second time or third) round. Immediately after finishing that level for the first time, i reloaded an auto-save of that level so i could play it again. There are many times in the game where you will encounter moments like this, and a few of them are generally quite memorable and intense when you're playing them. But the main highlight of the game, are its characters. And boy there are some COOL characters in this game. Perhaps the most interesting is Jeanette. Prancing about in pig-tails, a school girl outfit and whole lot of cleavage, she is a Malkavian nightclub owner in Santa Monica, whose pumped so full of silicon it would make Pamela Anderson impressed. Thats not the reason she's interesting though (wells, its part of the reason :P). The reason she's interesting is because of the biplay between her and her twin sister Therese, who also runs the same nightclub with her. Unlike Jeanette, Therese aint no hussie. Wearing fancy suits, glasses and capable of constructing proper sentences, she struts about her office in a business like manner and takes care of business whilst Jeanette takes care of the customers ;). After you do a few missions for both of the girls you'll learn more about their pasts and why they fight like they do, and the final outcome is very memorable moment (One which i wont spoil) that you'll surely remember long after you've finished the game. The dialogue in this game is perhaps the best dialogue since Grim Fandango, and thanks to the superb lip-syncing of the Source engine (not at its best here, but still leagues ahead of anything else in the industry) its delivered in the best possible way to give it an even better impact than in other games. Take Knights of the Old Republic for example: Fantastic dialogue, terrible lip-syncing. Here in Vampire: Bloodlines this is where the game really stands head and shoulders above any other RPG to date. The gameplay in Bloodlines is rather varied, but consists mainly on the type of person who is playing it. If you're a run and gun type of guy/girl, then you'll pull out a shotgun and start blasting away at the undead like there's no tomorrow. If you like stealth, you'll be sneaking around breaking people's necks, stabbing them through the back with swords and a whole bunch of other gruesome deaths. But if combat aint your thing, you can just smooth-talk your way through most situations. Unfortunately though, as you near the end of the game, smooth-talking begins to remove itself entirely and you're forced to take the violent approach. Also the combat is stat based too, so if this characters strength if greater then yours, they wont get hurt as much and yada-yada-yada I dont really know how it works but its something like that. The game also features its own Stat system like most other RPG based games (like Deus Ex or System Shock). For each mission you complete you each reward points which can be used on your character sheet. Most side-quests award you between 1-3 points, where as main quests can reward anywhere between 2-6. The stats range from your standard ones (Intelligence, strength, dexterity that sorta thing) to your more complex ones, such as Subterfuge (ability to conceal motives) and Scholarship (Ability to investigate and research). Esentially the system is quite effective in maintaining balance, as you can never become overpowered by upgrading all your stats as its impossible without cheats. Every stat effects a certain feat, and each feat is effected by 2 different stats and visa-versa. Strength effects Melee and Defence, Wits affects Investigation and Hacking etc. The difficulty level is just right for the type of people who find games like KOTOR fine, however if you found KOTOR hard, then you might want to consider how much you'll put into this game before buying it. Because there is no way to adjust the difficulty level at all. But fortunately (unlike Far Cry) there is a quick-save feature which you can abuse until your heart's content, and the game auto-saves quite often after loading a new level. The games pacing is quite good too, but also depends on the kind of player you are. If you enjoy side-quests then you'll find alot to do (not as much as KOTOR, but still alot). In total, if you're like me and only do about 1/3 or 2/3 of the side-quests then you'll end up spending about 40-50 hours trying to finish the game, and you'll even end up playing the game for up to 7 hours straight. If you just want to get straight down to business it might take a good 30 hours to finish the game if you dont skip through all the conversations. Vampire: Bloodlines uses the same engine as Half-Life 2, the Source Engine. Whilst its not the best engine out there its certainly good-looking and more then capable of doing the job (as proven with Half-Life 2). However it isn't utilised very well at all, and the game suffers from a large amount of bugs and problems because of Troika's inefficency with the Source engine. Often you'll be wandering through of the games main hubs, of which there are 4 main hubs (Santa Monica, Downtown, Hollywood and Chinatown) and there will be horrible stuttering. If you had problems with Half-Life 2 stuttering, you haven't seen anything until you've played this game. I'll tell you now, if you can't be bothered mucking around with tweaks and reading various forums in order to get this game working at its best, you're better off renting it. Also at one point in the game you're actually forced to use the console in order to skip past a scene that crashes 100 percent of the time. Other then that there is also the issue of a number of flickering textures, that really aren't that bad in comparison to the stuttering issue. However in certain area's the game does look quite good, but nothing outstanding when compared to the characters of the game, which are real stand-outs. The first time you see Ming Xiao, Jack, Venus or Nines Rodriguez you'll see how good the characters can look in this game, and believe me... They look very good. Overall Vampire Bloodlines is a very intriguing and addictive game, with simple stat based gameplay. Unfortunately because of its terrible stuttering and fatal bugs, at some stages the game can become completely annoying to play because of them, and it turns what would otherwise be a 9/10 game into an 8/10 game. If you're looking for a game with a great storyline and great characters, and you're willing to trudge through game-stopping bugs, they buy this game. If not, rent it. 
